


If I Picked You a Cesium Sunflower

by lady_daedalus



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Blind Character, Fairy Tale Elements, Fluff and Angst, Growing Up Together, Kaworu and his siblings, M/M, Nagisa family values, Post-Apocalypse, karlshaun
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-04-18 18:12:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 43,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4715714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_daedalus/pseuds/lady_daedalus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first thing Shinji noticed about him was the way his skin contrasted with the surroundings, a stark, unblemished section of canvas that the powers orchestrating the apocalypse seemed to have intentionally left blank. The second thing Shinji noticed was that his eyes were the same red color as the sea. </p><p>Or: The Post-Apocalyptic Ponyo Kawoshin that no one asked for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tell me more, tell me more (like, what are germs?)

**Author's Note:**

> 100 Kudos! (Well, at the time of posting this, 98, but close enough.) To celebrate 100 kudos on my first ever fanfic, have some Ponyo Kawoshins.

The first thing Shinji noticed about him was the way his skin contrasted with the surroundings, a stark, unblemished section of canvas that the powers orchestrating the apocalypse seemed to have intentionally left blank. The second thing Shinji noticed was that his eyes were the same red color as the sea. 

“I think this is yours,” the boy, who was wearing an orange T-shirt that came down to his kneecaps, said, holding up a makeshift fishing hook that had been fashioned from an old aluminum soda tab. He tried to shake off the moisture, and then eventually ended up wiping it on the driest part of his shirt when that didn’t yield any results. He held the tab out in front of him, looking as pleased as a dog that’s successfully fetched the stick.

Shinji dropped the gallon of water he was carrying and ran, kicking up clods of sand behind him.

Ten minutes later, he returned for the water, because Misato would not be pleased if he showed up without it. 

“You stay away,” he said to the boy, who was still standing in the same spot looking very confused. To make sure he got the message, Shinji brandished a large stick he had brought with him exclusively for brandishing purposes. 

The boy standing in the water puffed himself up indignantly. “Why?”

Shinji jabbed the pointy end of the stick at him. “‘Cause you’ve been in the water and you’re not wearing a mask or anything. You have germs.” 

“Oh,” said the boy, wilting a little. “Does that mean I can’t give this back to you now because I got germs on it?” 

“Yes,” Shinji confirmed, nodding his head emphatically. 

“Oh,” the boy said again.

Shinji pointed the stick to the gallon of water lying on its side in the sand now. “You didn’t touch this, did you?” he demanded haughtily.

“No.”

“Good.” 

Shinji tiptoed his way over to the water, keeping the stick pointed at the other boy all the while and trying not to breathe through his nose for fear of his olfactory center being assaulted by the acrid sea stench. He avoided having to look in the boy’s eyes by keeping his focus on the translucent plastic of the water gallon in front of him. 

“Hey,” said the boy, the sound of his voice accompanied by sloshing water as he waded a bit closer. “What are germs?”

Shinji’s face was obscured by the white mask he kept secured over his mouth and nose, but his eyes were still able to adequately convey his suspicion. “How do you not know what germs are?” he asked as he attempted to haul the water up into a convenient carrying position.

“I don’t know,” he heard the boy say through his grunts of effort; he was still determined not to look directly at him. “There’s lots of things I don’t know about. Like what was that song you were humming before?” 

“I wasn’t humming anything.” 

“No, not now. I meant the song you were humming _before_. The other day, when you were here fishing and you lost this.” 

Shinji finally looked up to see him holding out the soda tab fish hook again, though this time he was standing much closer than he had been before. Now the water was only up to his ankles, whereas it had previously been just below his knees. Shinji’s instinct was to jump back, but the water was weighing down his entire torso, and he was hunched over just trying to keep it off the ground with both hands. Instead, he tried to let his silence be his accusatory gesture, but this boy clearly wasn’t receiving any messages Shinji wanted to send, because in response, he just gave (what was, in Shinji’s opinion) a dopey smile and an expectant expression. 

“It was a very nice song,” the boy cued, obviously taking the silence as an invitation to jog Shinji’s memory. 

“Were you _spying_ on me?” 

“Not spying. Hey! Don’t ignore me,” he said when Shinji, visibly repulsed, began to walk away down the shore as quickly as his cargo would allow. The boy turned and began to cut a parallel path through the water, lifting his legs up absurdly with each step to try to minimize water resistance. “Hey!” he called out over his arrhythmic splashing, “Hey, tell me what the song was! And what germs are!” 

“Stop following me,” was all Shinji said before he resolutely turned his head the other way, toward the cliff. He blocked out the boy’s persistent “Hey!”s all the way to the stairs that led to the top of the cliff, and when he began to heave the water up one step at a time, he suddenly noticed their conspicuous absence. 

He turned around to see the boy standing on his tiptoes right at the edge of the water, straining to lean himself forward into the sand’s territory. He hopped from side to side like this, only going as far on the shore as the last breaking wave had spread itself before he ran back with the receding water. The sand was dotted with his tiny footprints, which were continually softening and disappearing with each sweep of the waves and the pink foam. Eventually, he tired himself out and stood there panting, swaying slightly each time a new incoming wave pushed through him. Again, Shinji regarded the peculiar image he made, this time from the higher vantage point that the stairs afforded him. The pallor of the boy’s skin and hair made him look like a little white buoy bobbing up and down in the sickly red sea, somehow unstained by both the water and the descending dusk. 

“Okay then! Come and see me again soon!” the tiny figure called out, his voice echoing slightly off the cliff face when it reached Shinji. Even in the fading daylight, Shinji could see the white of his arm as he waved heartily to him. 

Shinji gave a huff of exasperation even though he knew the boy couldn’t hear it, readjusted the elastic on his surgical mask, and turned away again. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is several firsts for me. First multichapter fic, first fic outside the 'Angst's in its canon' series, first fic that's fluff and angst (although with Evangelion, angst was coming for me sooner or later). First time writing for Karl! I really hope I didn't botch it. Qworu is my personal favorite, but I've already given him a trilogy, and people seem to have a lot of fun writing Karl, so I thought I'd give it a shot.
> 
> As always, you can come a-kawoshinning with me at lady-daedalus.tumblr.com.


	2. Muto, mutare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Why do you call him your mutant?"
> 
> "Cause I saw him first."
> 
> "Oh. Does that make me Ikari-kun's mutant?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We've arrived at 100 kudos for real this time now! Let's celebrate with a real chapter. It's Monday, but hopefully some Kawoshins will help?

When Shinji told them the tale of his encounter, Touji and Kensuke were very impressed. 

“Shinji! Do you know what this means?” Kensuke asked. “It means you’re the one who finally caught a mutant. And it talked to you! Aren’t you excited?”

“Not really. He was weird.”  

For the better part of the year or so that they had been friends, Touji and Kensuke had roped Shinji into going to the seashore with them to help them in their quest for glory via capturing and documenting the fabled mutant fauna abominations of the sea. A girl in their building named Asuka had informed them, with a level of superciliousness that was rather admirable for a six year old, exactly what she thought of their prospects.

“What are _those_?” she had asked, throwing a dirty glare at their homemade fishing rods. She had answered the door in bright red pajamas that she had done a good job of coordinating with both her hair and her mood. Even the unflattering fluorescent lighting of the hallway couldn’t dim her personality. 

Touji shifted his into a more ostentatious position on his shoulder and drew himself up to his full height so he could look down at her. “They’re fishing poles.” 

“You could have fooled me,” said Asuka, employing a new phrase she had learned from the couple who were always fighting next door. She had amassed a lot of useful phrases this way, although none of the adults to whom she repeated them seemed to appreciate her cultured spirit. On this occasion, though, the expression she had chosen was not entirely unwarranted, as the generously named fishing poles were, stripped of their title, sharpened soda tabs tied to some sticks with some string. 

“You’re not going to catch any mutants if you can’t even cast those. They all live in the deep water,” Asuka said knowingly.

“Nuh-uh,” retorted Kensuke. “My cousin caught a fish with three eyes once using this.” 

“Did you ever see it?” 

“No, but-”

“Ha!” She straightened herself out from where she had been leaning casually against the doorframe to her apartment to poke Kensuke in the chest. “Besides, that’s not even anything that interesting. It’s not like it had legs or anything. _I_ saw one with legs.” 

“Did not!” Touji said stubbornly, though he was intrigued.

“Did too. I was out _really_ early in the morning, like, 3 am, because I was bored and I couldn’t sleep. So I snuck outside and I was climbing on the fence by the cliff -”

“That’s so dangerous,” squeaked Shinji.

“Shut up, Stupid Shinji. So I was climbing on the fence, and that’s when I saw this gigantic thing. It had, like, kind of this bird-looking face, only it was completely white, and it walked on two legs and there was this big glowy red thing right in the middle of its chest.” Asuka held up her hands in a circle formation over her own chest to demonstrate. 

Kensuke scoffed. “You’re lying. You probably fell asleep or forgot to put on your mask and breathed in fumes or something.” 

“Fumes from what?”

“I dunno.” He waved his hand around in a vague “everywhere” motion above his head. “ _Fumes_.” 

“Well I know what I saw, and it was a giant black bird thing with legs standing in the ocean, and it looked right at me, so there. Tell your cousin to suck on that,” Asuka crowed, throwing in another useful expression from the neighbors. 

“Suck on what?” Kensuke asked, confused.

“Dunno. Now go away.” And with that, Asuka had shooed the three of them safely over the threshold before she shut the door on them.

Shinji had looked to his friends dejectedly. “I don’t think she wants to come with us.” 

That was six months ago. Shinji never expected that they were really going to catch anything, and he did feel a bit lame flicking the string into the water over and over, but it was something to do. Repeated failure to catch anything in the first week considerably dampened the boys’ spirits, and they soon moved on to other activities, although they still came back to the seashore sporadically to try their luck when they felt it might be a good day. On their most recent excursion, Shinji had planted his stick firmly in a mound in the sand so that he could wander off for a bit, and when he came back to pull in the string, the hook was missing. Upon seeing this, Kensuke immediately grabbed Shinji’s wrist, Touji the fishing pole, and they had run all the way back to the building to hammer on Asuka’s apartment door and show off the evidence when she answered. 

Asuka had not been nearly as enthused as they were. “Probably just got caught on some seaweed.”

Now everything was different, though, because Shinji had seen and talked to a real, live, mutant. “Asuka’s gonna be sorry now!” Touji said, taking the stairs to her floor two at a time. He threw open the door, forgetting that Kensuke and Shinji were lagging behind him, and accidentally let the door hit Kensuke in the face when he didn’t hold it open for them. When he and Shinji finally managed to get through to the other side, Touji was already down the hallway at Asuka’s apartment knocking restlessly at the door. 

“Hey Asuka! Asuka! Aaaaaasukaaaaa.” 

“Oh my god, what?” came her muted voice from the other side just before she yanked the door open. 

“Guess what.” 

“If you say ‘chicken butt’ I’m gonna punch you,” she said, making a fist for emphasis. 

“No! Guess what for real this time.” 

Asuka narrowed her eyes at the three of them. “What.” 

“Shinji saw a mutant!” Kensuke exploded before Touji could tell her to guess properly. To sweeten the deal, he added, “An _albino_ mutant. With _legs_. That can _talk._ ” 

“I bet he didn’t.” 

“Did too!” Touji chimed back in. “He talked to it and everything. It told him to come and visit it again soon, and we’re gonna go see it now.” 

“Nuh-uh.” 

“Uh-huh.” 

“Show me.” 

And that’s how Shinji ended up begrudgingly leading his sightseeing entourage back to the place where he met the boy with the germs. The four of them trekked down the cliffside stairs and across the beach to the same spot where Shinji had dropped his water gallon. There was still an indentation in the sand where it had been. Touji, Kensuke, and Asuka looked at him expectantly, the sound of the waves gently lapping at the cliff in the background.

“Maybe you should try calling its name,” Kensuke suggested when they had all been standing around awkwardly for a sufficient amount of time.

Shinji frowned. “How do I know what to call it?”

“It didn’t tell you?” 

“You didn’t even _ask_?” Asuka said, trying her best to look disapproving but unable to hide the giddiness she felt at proving herself right once again.

“No,” Shinji admitted, suddenly feeling stupid. 

“You have to try,” Kensuke begged, determined not to let Asuka win today. “Can you guess?”

“How would I know what a mutant sort of name is? It’s probably something humans can’t even pronounce.” 

“What about something sea-related? ‘Nagisa’ means something about the seashore, right? Try that one.” 

“What? No! That’s a stupid idea. You do it.” 

“No, it has to be you, because you’re the one who talked to it, and it told _you_ to come back, so it won’t listen to us. Pleeeaaase?” Kensuke implored, grabbing onto Shinji’s arm and letting his body slump down into prime pathos-inducing position. Touji followed his example, leaning forward onto Shinji’s shoulder to say “Pleeeeeeaaaase?” into his other ear. 

“Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaaaase?” they whined in unison, their voices taking on a mosquito-like hum for maximum vexing capacity. 

“Fine, just let go before I fall over,” Shinji finally conceded, tugging himself free of their hold. He had put on his rubber boots today, so he allowed himself to cautiously wade into the water a bit. Once he reached about mid-calf depth, he stopped and cast his eye about the horizon line, where the red water clashed with the deceptively optimistic blue sky. 

“Um,” he said, “Uh… Nagisa?” 

“You have to do it louder,” called Asuka from the sidelines, clearly enjoying his discomfort.

“Nagisa?” he said, raising his voice a little.

“Louder!” yelled Touji.

Shinji turned to glare at him. “You’re taking her side now?” 

“No, I want her to see the mutant so we can finally prove her wrong. But you need to try harder.” 

“Ugh.” Shinji kicked backward with his boot and watched them all scuttle backward from the splash with satisfaction. 

“Hey! If you get us infected with that stuff, I’m gonna tell on you,” Asuka said from where she had jumped behind a large rock. 

Shinji rolled his eyes, turning back to the sea so that he could pretend not to listen to her. “Um… Nagisa? Naaagisaaaa… Hellloooooo…”

“Helloooooo,” Touji and Kensuke joined in, cupping their hands around their mouths (though with the masks on, it probably didn't achieve much). “Helllooooooo…” 

“Hello!” said the white head that suddenly popped up from the water. 

All three of Shinji’s companions on the shore reeled. 

“Holy crap,” said Asuka over the background rhythm of Kensuke’s “Oh my god oh my god oh my god…” He began clicking the button on the old Polaroid camera he’d brought from home. His parents didn’t approve of him bringing it down to the beach because they thought he’d get sand in it, but he figured they would have to forgive him if he brought back proof that it was for a good cause.

At present, the boy’s head was the only thing above the water, rising and falling with its undulations. It looked disembodied, which Shinji didn’t like at all. “Come closer,” he said.

The boy’s face lit up. “Can I?” 

“Yeah, just don’t splash me.” 

The boy bounded over in slow motion courtesy of the water separating them. Watching his neck, shoulders, and torso emerge, Shinji felt much more at ease, and he showed it by reminding the mutant not to get _too_ close. The boy obeyed, kicking up a little murky cloud of sand when he dug his feet in to stop his momentum. He stood about five feet in front of Shinji, and he was still holding the fish hook with both his hands like it was a golden ticket instead of aluminum refuse.

“Hey,” he said, giving a wide grin. “Were you calling me just now?” 

“Um… yeah. We didn’t know what to call you, so we decided to use Nagisa, since you’re from the sea and everything.” 

“Oh! I like it. My siblings call me Tabris, but I like Nagisa better, so you can call me that.” He stopped and tipped his head to the side, almost at a right angle, to survey his audience on the shore. “Are these your friends?” Upon being indirectly addressed, Touji and Kensuke sprinted forward to introduce themselves. Asuka remained behind her rock, though she definitely looked intrigued. Nagisa seemed delighted at the attention, happily soaking up the information thrown at him. 

“You’re Suzuhara Touji?” he gaped, starstruck, regarding Touji like he was meeting a celebrity. “I think this is your shirt.” He turned around and pulled out the tag so they could see Touji’s name written on it in marker.

“What the heck! Where did you get that?” Touji shouted.

Nagisa turned back around, tucking the tag back in carefully as he audibly racked his brains. “Hmmmm… Well, I knew that I needed clothes, but I couldn’t get any because I can’t leave the water until I turn fifteen, so I asked one of my siblings to get me something from the clotheslines up there.” He nodded to the clifftop. “Do you want it back?”

“No, it’s fine,” said Touji, who Shinji suspected was being so permissive because he was looking forward to telling people that a mutant wore his clothes.

“You got siblings?” Kensuke asked in amazement. 

“Yeah, maybe you can meet them one day.” 

“How many?” 

“Fourteen.” 

“Holy crap,” Asuka reiterated. 

“Whoa, a whole family of mutants,” Kensuke marveled. Then he elbowed Asuka in the ribs. “Told you so. I bet that’s the hook Shinji lost, too,” he said, pointing to the battered-looking object in Nagisa’s fingers.

“It is!” said Nagisa happily, giving a little bounce of excitement. “I’m glad you noticed. I got this stuck on my hair, and I’ve been waiting to give it back. Um,” he started, suddenly deflating again. “Could one of you tell me what germs are? Ikari-kun said he won’t let me give it to him because I got germs on it.” 

“You know my name?” Shinji asked, appalled. 

“Yes.” Nagisa blinked his red eyes, unaffected by Shinji’s outrage. 

“I _knew_ you were spying on me! I’ll punch your teeth in!” 

Touji leaned forward and yanked Shinji backward by the collar of his shirt just as he lunged toward Nagisa, which allowed Nagisa to scurry back to the safety of the deeper water and sit safely at the point where only his eyes and the top of his head were peeping out from below. 

“Don’t scare him,” Touji said through gritted teeth in a hamfisted effort to be discreet. “We might never get to see another one.” 

Nagisa stuck his head fully out of the water to say, “Not spying!” before he hastily retreated to his previous stance.

“Hey, hey,” Kensuke said in a diplomatic tone, stepping as close to the water as he could without touching it. “There’s probably an explanation. It’s okay, Nagisa, you can come over here and we’ll tell you what germs are.” 

Nagisa’s eyes were wary, but he crept back to where he had been standing. He kept himself submerged so everything below his eyes was hidden the entire time, and only when he was sure Shinji wasn’t going to attack him again did he stand up with one movement. “Okay,” he said, neglecting to do anything about the water running down his arms and legs in rivulets from his T-shirt. Shinji kind of wanted to wring it out, but he harbored such an aversion for the creature inside it that it was only a fleeting urge.

“So, uh, germs,” Kensuke began, fumbling around for a good verbal lead. “They’re, like, these tiny things that make you sick,” he held up his thumb and forefinger and squeezed them together, “like, even smaller than this. Like, you could probably fit a _billion_ germs in the space between my fingers right now.” 

Nagisa squinted. “I don’t see any space.”

“Exactly,” said Kensuke smugly. He looked pleased to be in the position of knowing more than someone else. “And it’s a lot easier for them to make us sick if they get in through our mouth or nose, so we gotta wear these masks.” 

“Ohhh,” said Nagisa, nodding in the way that people do when they don’t really understand something, but they’re pretending to. “How come you won’t come in the water then?” 

“Everyone knows the water’s got the most germs of anywhere. That’s why we gotta boil it before we drink it, and we don’t even drink the ocean water. Ocean water probably has, like, all sorts of super germs that science doesn’t know about.” 

Nagisa looked frustrated. “But it’s never made me sick.”

“Cause you live in it. You’re all evolved and everything, with mutant genes. Hey, Asuka,” Kensuke said, suddenly reminded of something, “You should ask him if he knows your mutant.” 

When Asuka recounted to Nagisa the tale of her mutant sighting, he brightened and said, “Oh, that was probably Sachiel.” 

“Ha! Told you so!” Asuka boasted, pointing at Kensuke and Touji. 

“Uh-uh, we told _you_ so about this one _and_ the missing fish hook, cause you didn’t believe us either of those times,” retorted Kensuke.

“Yeah, but I told you so first,” Asuka rallied right back, yanking down her mask and sticking her tongue out for good measure.

Nagisa interrupted their argument when he turned to Asuka and asked, “Why do you call him your mutant?” 

“Cause I saw him first.” 

“Oh. Does that make me Ikari-kun’s mutant?” 

Shinji, who didn’t particularly care to join in on his friends’ and Asuka’s recreational squabbling and had drifted off into a pleasant daydream about making dinner, was brought back to the present with Nagisa’s inquiry. “No! And you better explain how you know what my name is or else.” 

“Or else what?” 

“Just… or else!” Shinji said, throwing his hands up in exasperation.

“All right then,” Nagisa acceded, though he didn’t seem entirely convinced. “I see people walk by here every once in a while, but it seems like I always see you walking back and forth here with your water container. Everyone else takes the same path up there coming back from the well, but you go out of your way to take a detour down here. That’s weird.” 

“Is not,” Shinji protested.

Nagisa just shrugged. “Anyway, I remembered seeing you with these two before, so I had one of my siblings let me know last time when all three of you came here together. It gets boring, sometimes, with no one else around. But yeah, that’s when I overheard your name. It’s more polite to use your surname, though, right? I haven’t gotten that wrong? I had to wait a little longer to hear that one.”

“How come you didn’t say hi back then?” Kensuke asked, looking a little put out that he missed out on the opportunity to be there for first contact.

“ ‘S not my fault. You were here too early. The timing wasn’t right.” Before any of them could ask him what he meant, his eyes went wide all of a sudden and he jumped forward a little to ask, “Hey, what was that stuff you put on the hook, the stuff you were using as bait?” 

Kensuke’s eyes drifted upward as he tried to recall. “Uh… I don’t know; we’ve used a couple different things before. Touji, do you remember the last one we used?” 

“Ham?” 

“ _Ham_ ,” Nagisa whispered reverently, his hands coming up over his mouth, red eyes filled with awe. 

“I told you it would attract mutants,” Touji murmured to Kensuke and Shinji. 

Asuka, who had finally crept out from her hiding place, managed to wedge herself in between Touji and Kensuke to see this creature for herself up close. “Didn’t it taste weird, being in the water and everything?” she asked.

“I just know it tasted really good,” Nagisa said. “My siblings were mad at me for eating it, but I think they were jealous.” 

Asuka, Touji, and Kensuke continued to assail their new acquaintance with questions (“What do mutants usually eat?” “Do all your siblings look like you?” “Do you have to sleep swimming like sharks?”) while Shinji tried his best to return to his imaginary dinner. Nagisa never let him stay there for long, though. Every time Shinji tried to inconspicuously edge away from the pack, Nagisa noticed, and he splashed right back over to Shinji’s side, agitating the sand and the tiny coastal fish that had gathered in a swarm around his ankles. They scattered, darting away frantically in all directions at the sudden movement, and when the water settled itself from the disturbance, they wriggled their way back over to him like faithful pets. The five children gradually worked their way down the beach in this manner when suddenly, Asuka padded over behind Shinji and slapped him hard on the back.

“What the heck!” 

“I saw a sand fly,” Asuka said unapologetically. “You’re gonna thank me later when you don’t have bites tomorrow.” 

“I’m gonna have a big fat handprint there tomorrow. You did that on purpose,” Shini retorted. He craned his neck over his shoulder and turned around and around, trying to see the injury down the back of his shirt to no avail. His indignation lost its momentum when he stopped turning to swat at the insect he saw crawling up his shirtsleeve. 

“See? Toldja.”

“Fine,” Shinji said, sulking a bit as he readjusted his shirt. He immediately clapped his hands together in front of his face when another hovered there aggravatingly. “How come they’re only coming by me?” 

“Maybe it’s the soap you use?” Kensuke proposed. 

Nagisa looked on, amused. “They must like you. _I_ like you.” 

“Augh!” Shinji yelled in frustration, both at the flies and at Nagisa. Right now he wanted nothing more than to grab hold of the infuriatingly jaunty-looking tufts of hair on the top of his head and give them a good, hard yank. 

Kensuke regarded the sky with an appraising expression. “I guess this is the time they start coming out. We were here a pretty long time.” 

The unrelenting daytime sun had finally decided it had had enough of exerting itself for the day, and was beginning to sink contentedly into the horizon line. The sky heralded its departure with a show of fantastic, chemical colors, pink phenolphthalein drips into a churning ocean solution that could react violently again any day now. The still visible portion of the sun shimmered in the heat haze almost ominously, as if threatening to become that very catalyst, with the red vein of the horizon poised to carry its consequences to the extremities of the earth. And somehow, Shinji was sure, Nagisa would still be there after everything else erupted, living out his life as a solitary white blood cell swimming in the red sea. 

“Do you have to leave me now?” Nagisa asked, expression crestfallen, as if he had tapped into Shinji’s recent musings.

“It looks like it,” Touji confirmed with an equally disappointed look on his face. “Time flies when you’re having fun.” 

“ ‘ _Flies_ ,’ ” Shinji spat resentfully, whacking his left shoulder with his right hand when he thought he felt the hair-like tickle of something landing there.

“Can we see you again tomorrow?” Kensuke asked, and Shinji could tell by his voice that he was trying not to sound too eager.

Nagisa cheered up a bit with his question; the hairs on top of his head even seemed to perk up a little. “Okay!” he said brightly. “I’d like that. Um, would you mind bringing some more ham when you come back?” 

“Uh,” Touji’s eyes darted back and forth. The ham had actually been a special occasion item; he’d swiped a little from the table during his sister’s birthday dinner to use as extra special bait for their excursion the next day. “I’ll… see what I can do. Is there anything else you want?” 

“Books,” Nagisa said without hesitation. “I don’t get to read very often, and when I do I can only read the stuff people leave behind on benches up there so my siblings can bring them to me without people noticing.” He lifted his eyes to the cliff top and pointed upward as if saluting the benevolent powers that afforded him these rare opportunities. 

“What kind do you want?” Touji asked, uncapping a pen he had in his pocket to scribble some notes on his hand. 

“Any kind. Right now the only one I have is… hang on,” he trudged through the water over to a spot where the rocks crowded themselves closer to the shoreline. He rummaged around in the space between two prominent ones, and returned with a severe-looking, severely damaged book. The pages were bloated, the mark of having recovered from some previous deluge it experienced in its hiding place, and the cover was beginning to peel into its separate layers. Nagisa displayed the dense tome to the four other children. “It’s this one.” 

“ _The Tale of Genji_?” Asuka said, reading the title aloud. “No, there’s no way you can read that.” 

“I don’t understand most of it,” Nagisa admitted, flipping through the pages casually. “I used to have some easier stuff, but it never lasted cause I don’t have somewhere safe where I can keep an eye on them for the rest of the month. So right now it’s just this.” 

“No problem,” Touji said, sticking out his chest proudly. “We can bring you lots more interesting stuff to read. Like, every day.” 

Nagisa frowned. 

“What?” Touji asked. 

“I only get to come to the surface three days of the month,” Nagisa explained, pointing upward again, but this time as if resigning to his cosmic authorities rather than praising them. “Full moon days, the day before, and the day after. I’m not sure why.” Up in the sky, the full moon glowed with a false benevolence.

Asuka pouted. “You mutants sure have a lot of rules.”

Nagisa just nodded helplessly.  

“So tomorrow’s the last time we can see you for a whole month?” Kensuke said, looking very put out. Even Asuka seemed dismayed. Shinji, on the other hand, was deeply relieved. At least now he could rest easy knowing the weird kid couldn’t follow him around wherever he pleased.

“Yeah.” Nagisa sniffed and rubbed his nose on the sleeve of his shirt. 

“We’ll just have to make tomorrow really, really good, then,” Kensuke asserted. “We’ll bring you lots of stuff, and we’re friends now, so we’ll hold on to your books when you can’t read them.” 

“Really?” Nagisa asked, pulling his shirt collar up and burrowing into it. 

“Yeah, really!” 

The group promised, amid Shinji’s infuriated swats at the emerging insect menace, to return the next day with offerings of ham and reading material, and to bring Shinji back in a more pleasant mood tomorrow. Shinji didn’t care much for that last bit. Then, after they had parted ways and were halfway up the stairs to the top of the cliff, they all agreed in delightedly hushed voices to keep Nagisa a secret between them for now, and Kensuke vowed to dispose of his pictures. The promise was made ostensibly so that they wouldn’t have to share him with anyone else, but mostly so that they could have an exciting group secret. When they had resumed their upward trek, Kensuke elbowed Shinji and said, “Nagisa _likes_ you.” 

“Shut up.” 

“What is he, like, the third one now?” Shinji had been playground married twice, first bullied into it by Asuka so she could have someone to playground marry, and second to Rei Ayanami, another girl in their class who everyone teased Shinji about liking because neither of them ever talked. 

Touji attempted to wiggle his eyebrows, but it didn’t work out very well. “He’s got almost the same eye color as Ayanami; does this mean you have a type?” 

“Shut _up_! He’s a boy!” 

Kensuke shrugged. “Maybe it’s not weird for mutants.” 

Shinji scoffed. “I think he probably just acts weird in general cause he’s a mutant; I don’t think he even knows about having crushes or anything. Now stop talking! He might be able to hear us with his mutant powers or whatever.” The four of them looked back over their shoulders to where Nagisa was still standing at the water’s edge, watching them. He waved when he saw them looking, and Shinji instantly snapped his head forward, ignoring Nagisa and his friends’ jibes as they continued to ascend the stairs.

 

The next day, Shinji received his first practical lesson in the concept of regret. 

The four friends returned to the seashore early the next day, unwieldy rubber boots on, because they (apart from Shinji) wanted to have as much time with Nagisa as possible before their monthly allowance ran out. Touji practically skipped down the stairs, the contents of the duffel bag on his back clanking as they were repeatedly agitated. They consisted of several cans of Spam Touji and Kensuke had recovered from a sweep of their pantries, a bottle of hand sanitizer Shinji had thrown in there in case Nagisa tried to touch them, some water bottles for themselves, and an assortment of books that Asuka, Touji, and Kensuke had randomly pulled off the most accessible shelves in their apartments. Shinji had the earphones of his tape player firmly lodged in his ears so that he wouldn’t have to listen to the other three gushing over their new friend. He had just gotten some new batteries for it after a weeks-long dry spell, and he wasn’t about to let this mutant stop him from enjoying it.

After they arrived at the bottom of the steps, Touji carefully deposited their gifts on the sand, and he and Kensuke ran into the water to begin their mutant-summoning ritual of calling Nagisa’s name in varying tones. Asuka stood off at a distance, refusing to participate but still eager to see him. Shinji settled himself somewhere between them, sitting on one of the rocks in the water and letting his feet dangle idly.

It didn’t take long for Nagisa’s head to pop up out of the water as it had the previous day, the same puppy excitement shining through his broad smile. He greeted Touji and Kensuke heartily, and he was wading up to them when he caught sight of Shinji sitting behind them.

“Ikari-kun!” 

He dashed right past his welcoming committee to where Shinji sat, sending water flying everywhere in his haste. When Shinji looked up, it was already too late to move away. Nagisa reached his rock, leapt forward, and threw his arms around Shinji’s shoulders.

Thoughts of _Germsgermsgerms_ raced through Shinji’s mind, which increased to a cacophonous _GERMSGERMSGERMS_ when Nagisa stretched himself up on his tiptoes where he stood in the water so that he could lean in and rub his cheek against Shinji’s, setting his surgical mask and his earphones askew. 

“Ikari-kun,” he said happily, oblivious to the way Shinji was squirming and trying to reach toward the duffel bag for the hand sanitizer. 

Shinji tried to signal Asuka to throw it to him, but she was clearly enjoying his distress too much to stop the fun now.

“I have decided on two things, Ikari-kun,” Nagisa announced.

Shinji had the presence of mind to rip the earphones fully out of his ears and toss his tape player to safety onto the dry sand before Nagisa could inadvertently knock it into the water in his enthusiasm.

“What?” he turned to the other boy to demand, once he was sure his prized possession was secure. 

Nagisa gave him his maddening, dopey smile again, its effect enhanced by the wet hair still plastered haphazardly all over his forehead and sticking out at odd angles. “I have decided,” he said, “That my full name is Nagisa Kaworu, and also that I love you.” 

Shinji was furious.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I remember reading somewhere that the spelling of Kaworu's name ("Kaworu" rather than "Kaoru") comes from the Tale of Genji. I might be wrong.  
> Poor Karl. He tries so hard.


	3. Cesium Sunflower Sutra

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Tell me the story of being married to Ikari-kun."  
> In which we learn the tale of Shinji's first playground marriage, and Asuka gives Kaworu ideas.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember how I started this fic to celebrate 100 kudos on OTCROA? Welp. Now the third installment in that series is at the exact same spot and I'm only updating this now because of the procrastination celebration.

_ Ritsuko finally set aside the lesson plan she’d been putting together around the fourth time she felt Asuka’s index finger doing an impressive woodpecker imitation on her shoulder.  _

_ “Yes, Asuka?”  _

_ “Can I borrow one of your lab coats?” _

_ Ritsuko raised a dark eyebrow at her. _

_ “Please,” Asuka quickly appended.  _

_ Good enough, Ritsuko thought as she massaged the little indentations her glasses left on the bridge of her nose. “What do you want it for?” she asked once she readjusted the frames to sit at just the right angle for looking over them authoritatively - that was a thing parental figures did, right?  _

_ “I wanna use it as a wedding dress. Me and Stupid Shinji are getting married.”  _

_ Lately, a new fad of getting married on the playground during recess had been sweeping through the lower-grade class that Ritsuko taught, which had begun about a week ago when Hikari Horaki and Touji Suzuhara had the inaugural ceremony. Good for them, Ritsuko had thought dryly, although not sarcastically. And then she had been promptly forced to confiscate the wedding ring, because “although I’m sure Hikari admires your craftsmanship very much, dear, I’m afraid a ring you cut out of a tin can is a bit of a safety hazard, so how about we just set it here and she can look at it, okay?” Hikari, the sweet girl, had taken it all in stride and fashioned them both some clover bracelets instead. All in all, it was a lovely ceremony. And naturally, now everyone else wanted one. _

_ “You and Ikari Shinji? Is that so?”  _

_ “Uh-huh.” _

_ “But you don’t even like him. You call him ‘Stupid Shinji.’ Ah… don’t do that, by the way.” _

_ Asuka was doing that thing she was rather fond of doing when things weren’t going her way, wherein she started rubbing her toes aggressively against one another and appeared to be simultaneously holding her breath and trying to force it out. This behavioral approach had evolved from its earlier tantrum stages, in which Asuka had been rather deeply entrenched prior to living with Ritsuko.  _

_ “You’re a very bright girl, Asuka,” Ritsuko had said one day, calmly flipping through a dog-eared book, apparently having managed to find herself a cozy little spot in the eye of the storm Asuka was stirring around her. “So I think I’ll tell you about buffers.” Asuka hadn’t been terribly keen on the idea of an inorganic chemistry lesson or chemistry-themed japery at the time, and she had expressed it by grabbing a shoe from the floor and hurling it at Ritsuko with a shriek. Ritsuko dodged in her chair and continued. “A buffer,” she explained, “is a substance created by mixing a weak acid or weak base with its salt that then resists changes to the pH of its solution in the presence of strong acids and bases.” Asuka threw the other shoe, but sent it spinning off at such a sharp angle that Ritsuko didn’t need to avoid it, and could instead devote her faculties to finishing her improvised lesson.  _

_ “The point I’m trying to make,” she’d said, “Is that I’ve committed myself pretty thoroughly to being the buffer in this relationship, so it behooves me to tell you now that you can try to escalate things as you like, but you’re not going to change the pH of this conversation.”  _

_ That had been about a year ago, and now here they were, and Asuka’s breath all came rushing out with one exhalation as she was forced - as she always was when she tried this sort of thing - to come to the realization that hypoxia was not a good fit for her lifestyle.  _

_ “But… But you don’t need all of your lab coats,” she wheedled. “And I just need it for one day.”  _

_ Ritsuko had to abandon her Official Parental Figure costume when the heat kept causing her glasses to slip down her nose far past the optimal parenting height. However, their weight did at least make a nice, authoritative-sounding clack when she set them aside on the table. She quickly swiped at the sweat on her nose with her sleeve before it had a chance to ruin the effect. “Listen,” she said. “Shinji is a very nice boy…”  _

_ Asuka grunted. Ritsuko ignored it. _

_ “…Shinji is a very nice boy, but I’m afraid it simply wouldn’t do to marry him when you don’t even like him.”  _

_ “So?” Asuka asked, wadding the hem of her shirt into a ball and twisting it ferociously as she did so. “Lots of people who are married don’t like each other.”  _

_ Ritsuko’s teeth caught the inside of her cheek moving upward into a wry smile. “Well,” she said through a mouthful of cheek, hoping that she might be able to pass it off as a “oh yes, I am the thoughtful sort who gnaws thoughtfully on my cheek whilst I am lost in my thoughtful thoughts” sort of thing. “Well, you’re, uh,” she cleared her throat to cover a giggle at Asuka’s deadpan serious expression. “Yes, in practice, that’s usually how things end up working out, isn’t it? But in theory, you’re supposed to like the person to whom you’re getting married.”  _

_ Asuka gave another indignant, forceful twist to the thoroughly crinkled ball of yellow shirt in her hand. “I’m not marrying him in theory, though. I’m marrying him in practice.  _ Ergo _, marrying Stupid Shinji isn’t a problem.” She stressed the _ ergo _ in the manner of one ostentatiously flexing his muscles hoping that nobody else realizes what he’s doing. _

_ Eventually, Ritsuko decided that this was not, after all, the hill she wanted to die on, as her mother would say, so she ultimately told Asuka, “As long as Shinji’s okay with it, then fine; you can borrow the lab coat.”  _

_ Shinji was not fine with it. Neither, for that matter, was Hikari.  _

_ “You’re just copying me,” she had peppered in amongst Shinji’s vehement, “I don’t wanna”s during class the next day.  _

_ “What seems to be the problem?” Ritsuko asked when the commotion became conspicuous, although she knew very well what the problem was. She collapsed down into a kneeling position beside their group in a practiced gliding motion that conveyed “I am the sort of teacher who you read about in children’s books; that is to say, I am very graceful and that somehow translates to being very good at my job, so you should respect me.”  _

_ “Tell Asuka that she can’t force me to marry her,” Shinji commanded, pointing his purple crayon accusingly at Asuka just as Hikari said, “Asuka’s copying me cause the only reason she wants to get married to Shinji is that I got married to Touji.” Hikari shook her clover bracelet (the latest one in a series of fast-wilting marital metaphors) as if it were a piece of damning evidence. _

_ Ritsuko addressed Shinji first, placing two fingers atop his wrist and gently pushing it down. “Don’t point things, Shinji; it’s not nice.”  _ Furthermore, if you’re going to threaten someone, a dull crayon is not the most effective choice of weapon; you could at least make it a sharp crayon _, is what she didn’t say. _

_ “Sorry,” Shinji mumbled, shrinking a bit into his shirt, turtle-like. _

_ “Hikari, instead of thinking about it like everyone’s copying you, I think you should feel pleased that you’re a trendsetter. This way, you get to give advice to all the other couples. I’m sure Asuka would love to have you as her maid of honor to help her plan. Right, Asuka?” Ritsuko asked Asuka pointedly, turning to shoot her charge a stern look over her glasses.  _

_ “Okay,” Asuka sighed, and Hikari straightened up a bit, looking very pleased with herself.  _

_ “Shinji’s right, though; you can’t make him if he doesn’t want to,”Ritsuko continued. “So no wedding planning at all unless he says yes, okay?”  _

_ “Okay,” Asuka sighed again, dragging this one out a bit more. As she did so, her whole body seemed to flatten a bit, although the keen observer would note how something in her eyes remained very stony and resolute indeed. _

_ Shinji saw it up close and personal when Asuka accosted him in the hallway of their building while he was on his way out to get water. “Do the wedding,” she said firmly, planting herself resolutely in the doorway so he couldn’t get out.  _

_ “No.”_

_“Do the wedding,” she said a bit more harshly once she had grabbed Shinji’s ear and begun to pull at it. _

_ “Mm-mm,” Shinji grunted, shaking his head and quickly discovering that he shouldn’t have, as the movement only further aggravated the quickly reddening skin. _

_ “I’ll boil your water for you for a week.”  _

_ Shinji continued to squirm. _

_ “I’ll boil your water for you for two weeks, and we can get divorced right away.”  _

_ “Ugh, fine,” Shinji finally caved, shaking his ear free and gingerly rubbing the base of it to soothe the ache. Truthfully, he’d only agreed out of convenience, because he was on a schedule and he needed to be back before it got dark (Asuka had planned that out, too), although the prospect of not having to literally sit around and watch water boil wasn’t a bad one. _

_ “Great. I’ll go over to Hikari’s so we can start working on the decorations.” _

_ On the day of the actual wedding, Asuka stood in the lot outside their building in Ritsuko’s lab coat with Hikari solemnly standing behind her to hold her train. Her surgical mask was decorated with drawings of various flowers, some of which probably didn’t strictly exist, but served their decorative purpose well enough, and the artistic merit of which many members of the gathered congregation complimented her on later. In her hands she held a single sunflower, which she had clumsily wrenched out of the nearby field and was thus liberally dripping sap onto her hands from the end of its jagged and crushed stem. She tried to ignore both this and the stem’s fine hairs that kept poking and tickling her skin. She didn’t do a very good job.  _

_ “Tell Stupid Shinji to hurry up; this flower’s all sticky,” she yelled to Kensuke, who was serving as best man.  _

_ Kensuke finally managed to push Shinji forward, his own sunflower in hand, despite Shinji’s efforts to the contrary, and the two of them glared at each other over the yellow petals.  _

_ “Perk up; it’s our wedding,” said Asuka. _

_ “You first,” Shinji shot back. He was wearing a standard black necktie over his normal clothing that Kensuke had awkwardly tied into a lopsided knot, since none of them actually knew the proper way to tie one. It sagged heavily to the left, with the short end of the knot dangling floppily at an angle on the right. Asuka’s lip curled at the sight of it.  _

_ “We are gathered here today,” announced Touji in his most important-sounding voice, “to celebrate the marriage of Soryuu Asuka Langley and Ikari Shinji. Um…” he paused, as he wasn’t actually sure what was supposed to come afterward. (“I told him he should have practiced,” Hikari would bemoan after the ceremony.) Before him, the congregation of classmates shifted about uncomfortably, trying not to let the wind blow away the handfuls of browning sunflower petals they held. “Uh…” He tried to squint through the glare from the sun to see if Hikari was giving him any hints. _

_ In the end, it was Asuka who spared him. “We wrote our own vows,” she said brusquely, and she thrust her left hand out for Shinji to hold. He took it reluctantly, grimacing when he felt the sap at how very unsanitary this all was. _

_ “I, Soryuu Asuka Langley,” Asuka said, nearly chanting the words, “take thee, Stupid Shinji, to be my husband out of the magnanimity of my own heart, ye, I have taken pity upon thee and thine utter ineptitude, thine ignorance and thy many, many shortcomings. For thy shortcomings are e’en greater when cast under the shadow of my own excellence; yet I will tolerate you anyway anon. Forsooth. Verily.” Ritsuko, who was monitoring from the sidelines, resisted the urge to applaud along with the other students; after all, they had not been forced to listen to Asuka practice that speech for the better part of the previous night, nor were they constantly being pestered for help during the writing process.  _

_ Shinji may not have entirely understood what she was saying, but he was bright enough to know that it probably wasn’t very nice. His eyes visibly scrunched up above his surgical mask and he said, “Soryuu Asuka Langley, I don’t like you, and you don’t like me, so I guess that way we’re kind of perfect for each other. That is all.”  _

_ Asuka blew a muffled raspberry at him behind her mask. Then she took a black marker that Hikari had been holding and used it to draw a rough approximation of a ring around her finger. After she was finished, she passed it off baton-like to Shinji so that he could do the same. _

_ “You may now kiss the bride,” Touji declared in a last-ditch effort to reclaim his command over the ceremony. _

_ When Asuka pulled down Shinji’s mask, she cringed at his queasy expression. “Calm down,” she said, “It’ll be just like eating vegetables. If you hold your breath you won’t get grossed out and then it’ll be over.”  _

_ Shinji was about to ask where exactly she had heard that analogy when her index finger and thumb clamped down soundly on either side of his nose and she awkwardly pulled him forward to peck him on the lips.  _

_ “See?” she said, although it was mostly drowned out by Shinji’s scandalized gasp.  _

_ “I now pronounce you man and wife,” said Touji, which was the cue for all the other students to toss their sunflower petals into the air.  _

_ The last descending petal had barely touched the pavement when Asuka suddenly threw her sunflower down onto the ground and proclaimed with the same rehearsed, sonorous tone in which she had delivered her vow, “Stupid Shinji, you’re a horrible kisser and a bum. I want a divorce.”  _

_ “Not if I divorce you first,” Shinji recited as they had practiced, throwing down his own flower for good measure. It rolled over feebly on its side. _

_ “Well we’ll just see about that.” _

_ “I guess we will.” _

_ “Good.” _

_ “Fine.” _

_ Then the two of them stomped theatrically over to a nearby table, upon which was located a rock, and under that rock was a piece of paper upon which was written the word “DIVORCE PAPERS” in Asuka’s bold handwriting. They scrawled their names on either one of the Xs at the bottom of the page, scribbled over the lines on their ring fingers with the same black marker they’d used to make them, and that was the end of that. Five minutes later, they were sitting side by side along with Touji, Kensuke, and Hikari, spending the remaining minutes of recess daring each other to eat the unripe sunflower seeds. _

_ All in all, it was a lovely ceremony. _

 

Asuka thought of that day while she watched Shinji frantically slather homemade hand sanitizer (mainly rubbing alcohol) all over his arms and legs with ritualistic fervor. He had immediately leapt out of the newly named Kaworu’s reach at the first chance he got, and now he stood almost hugging the cliffside in an endeavor to be as far from the water as he could. Meanwhile Kaworu, forced to obey the bounds of the sea, lay facedown in the shallows pouting quite admirably. 

“Why doesn’t Ikari-kun like me?” he whined, turning his face to the side, front crawl-style, so he could talk. Because of this, his words came out sounding a bit gargled, but his crestfallen expression more than adequately conveyed his feelings.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” Kensuke said gently. He, Touji, and Asuka had crowded around his prone form and had all assumed the same hunched position, hands on knees, to talk to him. 

“Yeah, Shinji’s not a people person,” Touji reassured. “Don’t take it personal.” 

“But I _love_ him,” Kaworu wailed, rolling back over on his face and blowing distressed bubbles in the red water.

“Well that escalated quickly,” Kensuke murmured under his breath just as Asuka said, “It’s okay, Kaworu, it’s not that great being married to him anyway. Trust me, I would know.” The other two nodded in solidarity.

“Do you love him, or do you just love the _idea_ of him?” Kensuke asked sagely. 

“What’s the difference?” came Kaworu’s voice, although this time the sadness was tinged with frustration. 

“I don’t know. I just hear people say that a lot and I thought you might know cause you read.” 

“Well I don’t,” Kaworu burbled miserably into the sand. “I just have this tepid, sticky feeling squeezing something in my chest, so I’m pretty sure that means I love him.” 

“Gross,” Asuka whispered.

Kensuke attempted to begin damage control. “Okay. Okay. Uh… how bout you tell us a little about your family?” 

Kaworu flopped over onto his back again with a little splash to gaze up at the three of them wistfully. “Tell me a story about you first.” 

“Sure,” Kensuke agreed. “What kind of story?” 

“Tell me the story of being married to Ikari-kun,” Kaworu said, addressing Asuka. 

Asuka beamed. She loved telling this story. She made herself comfortable on one of the flatter nearby rocks, as did Touji and Kensuke, simply tickled pink to be the center of Kaworu’s rapt attention for a while. He listened, eyes wide, entirely fascinated with the whole production. (“Does he like sunflowers? _I_ could give him sunflowers.”) Somewhere in the middle, Touji passed him one of the cans of Spam that he had opened, and between that and all the new information, Kaworu was in a much better mood by the end of the tale and much more willing to offer up detailed descriptions of all his siblings in lieu of payment. 

Kaworu had a positive litany of siblings. In between verbal portraits of Sachiel, Shamshel, Ramiel, Gaghiel, Israfel, Sandalphon, Matarael, Sahaquiel, Ireul, Leliel, Bardiel, Zeruel, Arael, and Armisael, he kept sneaking glimpses over to Shinji’s hiding spot behind a cluster of boulders, hoping to catch him looking. He inevitably found himself disappointed each time. 

The other three children, on the other hand, were enjoying themselves immensely. “So, okay, tell me if I have it right,” said Touji in a cautious yet excited tone. “Sachiel… Shamshel… Sandalphon, uh… Sa… Sara… Ugh, I can only remember the S ones.” 

“Sachiel, Shamshel, Ramiel, Gaghiel, Israfel, Sandalphon, Matarael, Sahaquiel, Ireul, Leliel, Bardiel, Zeruel, Arael, and Armisael,” Kaworu chirped. His head rocked back and forth to the rhythm like a metronome as he rattled off their names again.

“Go slower so I can write it down,” said Kensuke, who had been taking notes the entire time.

Kaworu repeated his chant several more times until Kensuke was satisfied with the results. Creative liberties regarding the spelling were made, and Kaworu gently corrected them, graciously adding small doodles in the margins for what each of his siblings looked like. 

“I’m so mad we have to wait a whole month to see you again,” Touji said when only the barest sliver of sun was casting a shining trail of ripples over the horizon line. “We didn’t even get to give you the books we brought.” He shook his bag in demonstration.

“It’s okay,” said Kaworu cheerfully, though it was fairly obvious that he was only hiding his displeasure.“After all, it’s not like I’m going anywhere. Tell Ikari-kun goodbye for me.” 

 

Approximately one month later, standing outside in the middle of the night, Shinji would find himself being hit in the face by something slightly prickly. When he looked down at his feet where it landed, he would see lying there, pulled up roots and all, a sunflower.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a headcanon that in this AU, sunflowers are considered lucky because they supposedly are able to take radioactive materials out of soil (turns out that it's not... terribly effective, though). When it comes to the cause of Second Impact, no one really knows what it was, and in the years immediately following it a lot of people thought it was a nuclear explosion. Over time, they realized people weren't really dying of radiation, but the sunflower myth endured so people still keep them around as a superstitious sort of thing. That title change sure makes more sense now, doesn't it?  
> The chapter title is a shameful superficial reference to Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra." I'm such a preppy poser. Stick your middle finger up at me.  
> Next chapter: meet the parents (sort of)! Introducing Misato and Best Big Brother Sachiel. 
> 
> Would you like to play the "feed my insecure need for external validation" game? Hit that kudos/comment button! 
> 
> As always, you can come a-kawoshinning with me at lady-daedalus.tumblr.com.


	4. My Neighbor Sachiel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Misato gets the birthday happiness she wished for. Kaworu and Sachiel crash the party.  
> WoodlandAsh (yes, the one with the Artifical fic!) made me some [adorable fanart](http://woodlandash.tumblr.com/post/138647585481/lady-daedalus-is-writing-the-cutest-ponyo-au-i)!  
> 

Misato savored the feeling of the ink welling around her index finger as she dipped it into the bottle. This one had a pleasant viscosity; she could practically feel the surface tension of the liquid creeping up her finger. Gently, she caged the squat glass bottle with her free fingers and gave it a small shake, humming contentedly at the liquid swish of its contents against her skin and the thick, rich sound it made as it lapped against the sides. She could almost picture the way it would slosh against the crystalline walls, leaving a faint stain that, given a few seconds, would slide indolently back into the black pool from whence it originated. 

“It take it you find the offering satisfactory?” Ritsuko asked, and Misato distinctly heard the cheeky smirk in her voice.

“You have done well, mortal,” Misato said grandly. “The Venerable Katsuragi will remember your generosity come Judgment Day.” 

“Don’t forget about the second part of your present,” said Ritsuko, and Misato heard the smooth slide of something being pushed across the table. She reached out her other hand to feel and the pad of her finger came in contact with the sleek surface of what must have been some very high quality paper indeed.

“Where did you find this?” she asked in amazement. 

“Happy birthday,” said Ritsuko. The smirk in her voice had broken and bled out into a full grin. 

“Seriously. Where did you get it? This is like… pretentious paper,” Misato pressed, unable to stop running her fingers over it in admiration. She skimmed it with her fingertips first, then turned her hand over to let her knuckles brush against it reverently, then repeated the process.

“Let’s just say it took many, many rounds of trading,” said Ritsuko, who was cracking her knuckles in the satisfaction of a job well done.

“It’s like _butter_ ,” Misato whispered. “My dad had a friend in America once who was always going on about butternut squash. This paper feels like what the phrase ‘butternut squash’ sounds like. I kind of don’t want to use it.” 

“Well, that just breaks my heart,” said Ritsuko with an exaggerated pouty affectation. Misato would bet her birthday gifts she was even sticking her bottom lip out and everything. “After I went through all that trouble slaving under the hot sun, haggling with cranky old people — I don’t know how Kaji deals with them all day, anyway. And you won’t even use it; Misato I am _slain_. I am positively slain.” 

“God, fine; just quit bitching.”

“Come now, you know that’s impossible for me.”

“Ugh,” Misato groaned, though she was still smiling. She slid the top piece of paper over to her waiting writing hand and aligned the top edge with the bottle so she could gauge its position. Meanwhile, her right index finger gave an anticipatory little wiggle from inside the bottle. She lifted it and allowed gravity to do its work collecting the liquid into a small, berry-sized droplet at her fingertip. She quite liked that imagery, and pursued it a bit longer, imagining it growing riper and heavier with dew before she crushed it between her fingers - this had been a favorite summer pastime of hers as a young girl, when summer had been its own distinct season. The ink smearing across the contours of her fingerprints took her back to the action of idly picking leaves off trees in passing so that she could grind them down to a green chlorophyll paste in her hands. She actually still liked to participate in this ritual while she was out gardening, although she had to take care not to pick from the specimens she was trying to cultivate.

When Misato dipped her finger once more into the bottle and finally allowed it to take stage on the paper, she actually sighed at the sensation of her finger skating across its surface. “Oh, that _is_ nice,” she said dreamily, finishing off a quick “water” character as a test.

“Lovely as usual,” Ritsuko said, applauding. “Not that I would really know, though. Maybe it’s actually hideous and it’s just that my heathen eyes aren’t refined enough to know better.” 

Misato stuck her tongue out, and Ritsuko laughed. “I was wondering where Asuka was getting that from. You’re such a bad influence.”

“How’s Asuka doing, by the way?” 

“She’s been… I’m not sure if ‘getting along’ is the correct terminology, but she certainly has been spending more time hanging out with Kensuke and Touji lately. They’ve got a little project they like to work on during free time where they draw comics ofcharacters they make up and then get into arguments about which one would win in a fight. That reminds me - which one sounds like a more powerful name to you: Sahaquiel or Zeruel? They’ve been going around asking people for a poll.” 

Misato’s finger paused for a moment as she thought. “Um… I don’t know, the second one maybe? How do you even remember them?” 

“Asuka’s _very_ insistent about being able to keep them straight. She’ll probably want to tell you all about them when she gets here, so you should pay attention. Also, another word of advice: if you’re ever talking to Kensuke about it, make sure that you refer to it as his _graphic novel_. That’s very important.” 

“I see,” Misato said bemusedly. She traced a few more familiar characters from muscle memory before she stopped again, raising her head and sniffing.

“Do you smell something burning?”

“Sssshhhhh…” Ritsuko’s hushing overtook her at the last syllable of “burning.” “It’s all part of your birthday present. Don’t worry about it. Have some watermelon.” The distinct sound of a ceramic plate moving over the tabletop made itself known.

Misato frowned. “Is it Kaji’s?” 

“Yes, but this is birthday watermelon, not ‘look at how much better my garden is’ rivalry watermelon, so you’re safe just for today.” 

“I’d rather hear about your arson present,” Misato groused.

“I have already said too much about the arson present, I’m afraid. Have some watermelon.” 

“Fine.” Misato held out her inky hand precariously so as not to stain anything. “Where’s Shinji?” 

“Helping set up your arson present.” 

“Hmph.”

“Just eat it with your other hand.” 

“If I get watermelon juice on your furniture, that’s your fault.” 

“And I shall clean it without complaint. Consider it another of your birthday perks.” 

And so their time together slipped by easily and quickly, with Ritsuko catching Misato up on all the latest building gossip and stories of Kaji being berated by old ladies, which Misato enjoyed with vindictive relish. It helped her somewhat to swallow the wounded pride (and the watermelon) Kaji had provided, which was, she hated to admit, rather good. The crackling sounds of the fire that drifted in along with its scent (that always smelled vaguely like ham) created a very pleasant atmosphere. When the sunlight coming in from the window shifted over to where Misato was sitting, she might have fallen asleep had she not been in the middle of a conversation.

“So Kaji goes to give the lady her lunch, and he asks her if she would like some water, and the lady yells, ‘What do you think?’ ” Ritsuko pitched her voice to a high squawk for the imitation. “And Kaji says ‘Well, I was just making sure,’ and then she told him to go to hell, and he said, ‘Oh… I don’t think I want to do that.’ ”

Misato snorted. “A woman after my own heart, then. I ought to send her flowers.” 

“Then, for some reason, she got it in her mind that there were newspapers all over the floor and she started demanding to know who put them there. So Kaji — I don’t know; he must have been trying to play along by saying he did it, and she goes, ‘Well, you’d better start picking them up, then!’ and hit him with her cane. I think Kaji —” Ritsuko stopped short, and Misato noticed too that the sound of the fire had died down. 

“I’ll finish this story in a little bit; hang on,” said Ritsuko, her voice accompanied by a rushed scraping of her chair against the floor. 

“Wait, what? No! I need my daily dose of schadenfreude, dammit!” 

“I know, I know, but your arson present is time-sensitive, so I have to go help prepare it.” Ritsuko’s voice faded along with her footsteps as she departed.

Misato flopped back in her chair resignedly, rocking it back off its front legs a bit in her frustration. Fortunately, she wasn’t left waiting too long, because shortly afterward, she heard the sound of something being wheeled past her along with a duet of “Hi Misato”s from Shinji and Asuka. They, accompanied by Ritsuko, wheeled their cargo — whatever it was — back and forth for a few trips, although it took Misato only about one and a half of these trips to figure out from the sounds they were making and their location exactly what the nature of her present was.

Somewhere during this process, their cart bumped up against something, and Asuka hissed, “Shit!” Misato could very well imagine the guilty look in her eyes when she heard the sound of Asuka’s hand clapping over her mouth afterwards. Ritsuko, however, just said, “I’ll allow it. It only got on your shoes, right? You’re not hurt?” 

“Nah.”

“Okay, good. Shinji, we’re almost done here; do you want to go and clean the ink off of Misato’s fingers for her?” 

“ ‘Kay.” Armed with a bucket of water and a bristle brush, Shinji ran up to Misato’s side to take the hand in question. Once he had situated himself beside her, he proceeded to aggressively scrub away to his little heart’s content. This was a service he regularly provided for Misato after gardening and after fixing the other residents’ bicycles for them. He even took special care to clean under the nails. Misato knew he didn’t like it when the job was ink, since there was always a faint stain that just had to rub off the skin on its own schedule, but he never complained. Ritsuko had joked once that he was like those little cleaner shrimp in the touch tank at the aquarium (when there still were such institutions). 

Every minute or so, the sound of Asuka’s feet would come running out to them, and she’d say, “Hey, hey, Misato, feel this.” And Misato would dip her finger into a little bowl of water to feel the temperature.

“Too hot.”

A minute later: “What about now?”

“Still a little too hot.”

A minute later: “What ‘bout now?” And so on until Misato finally gave a silent thumbs up.

Asuka’s feet tapped out an excited little step dance. “Okay, follow us.” 

“Wait!” yelled Shinji. “You left your gloves in the middle of the floor. What if she trips on them? What if she _dies_?” 

Misato reached out to ruffle Shinji’s hair. “I think the most I would get out of stepping on them would be a small surprise, and I’m not nearly of the age to be dying of such easily-induced heart attacks. Thank you for looking out for my safety, though, Shin- _chan_.” 

Misato followed Asuka into the bathroom of the apartment she shared with Shinji, and when she arrived, Asuka instructed her to kneel by the normally unused bathtub.

“Feel,” she said, and Misato cautiously bent down to submerge her forearm in the warm water currently occupying it.

“Surprise!” Asuka and Shinji said, and although Misato wasn’t all that surprised, she still gushed over it because she knew how much effort they must have put into the project.

“And don’t worry, ‘cause I cleaned the tub before we filled it,” said Shinji authoritatively.

“And! And!” Asuka suddenly shoved something floral under Misato’s nose. “Smell.” 

“It smells lovely. What is it?”

“It’s lavender oil. It was my idea.”

“It was _our_ idea,” Shinji huffed.

“Whatever. We found a bunch of these flowery oils in a drawer in one of the other apartments that no one lives in, and _I_ wanted to give you peppermint, but Ritsuko said no, ‘cause it’ll give you a rash, and lavender’s the only one that won’t so now you get lavender. Do you like it?”

“I absolutely love it,” said Misato as she allowed Asuka to place the small bottle in her open hand. “Thank you to all three of you.”

“Okay but you should get in before it gets cold and me and Shinji and Ritsuko’ll be outside if you need us so just call us okay? Happy birthday,” Asuka said, tiptoeing up to give Misato a kiss on the cheek.

“Happy birthday, Misato,” said Shinji, and he did the same before the pair of them scurried out of the room to give her some privacy.

 

“Did you really like your present?” Shinji asked that night as they were getting ready for bed. His voice was a little muffled from being pressed against Misato’s stomach for his goodnight hug. 

“Of course. It was so thoughtful.” 

“That’s good. We worked really hard on it.” 

“I could tell.”

“We had to, like, have a whole wheelbarrow full of dirt to put out the fires we used to boil the water. A really big wheelbarrow.” 

“You don’t say,” Misato giggled and bent down to kiss the top of his head with an exaggerated _mwah_. “My Shin-chan takes such good care of me. I’ll have to think of something extra-special for your birthday next year.”

“Don’t think about it yet, ‘cause it’s still your birthday.” 

“For a few hours, yes. Good night, Shinji.” 

“ ‘Night.” 

“Love you.”

“Love you.”

 

But Shinji, like the rest of the building that night, didn’t get much sleep because Shinji, like the rest of the building, was woken up by what he initially thought to be an particularly violent thunderstorm judging by the crashing sound of waves against the cliffside and the deep, earth-shaking rumble he felt. But then he noticed that what he thought were low thunderclaps were a little too regular in their rhythm, and then another set started up, and it sounded like it was immediately outside the door.

Actually, the second set was just Asuka pounding on it. Shinji was quite surprised when he climbed onto his step stool to look out the peephole and saw a walking mass of red bedhead standing there.

“Shinji!” Asuka yelled when he opened the door. He couldn’t help but notice that she had left off the “Stupid” prefix this time. “Shinji! Oh my god, oh my god, it’s my mutant! Outside! You have to come see!” 

Shinji barely had time for a bleary “… What?” before Asuka grabbed his wrist and started flying toward the building entrance with him in tow, causing him to stumble over his own feet in the process.

In her excitement, Asuka smacked into the heavy front door like a bird flying into a window, her small frame not providing nearly enough force to immediately overcome its inertia, even with the added force from her speed. She threw her entire body against it, and her bare feet kept sliding back on the floor. 

“Help me, Stupid Shinji,” she barked, throwing a glare over her shoulder to see Shinji using both his hands to keep his shirt collar yanked up over his nose. 

“Good God; would you forget about the germs for like two seconds?” 

“Mm-mm.” 

Asuka groaned loudly and pushed herself back from the door, abandoning the progress she had made. She marched up to Shinji and poked him hard in his stomach, which was now uncovered by his shirt. 

“Ow!” 

“Move your butt, Stupid Shinji, or we’re gonna miss it. Everyone else is already out there.” 

Reluctantly, Shinji pushed his weight against the door with her, and the second there was a large enough gap to squeeze out of, she grabbed his wrist again and pulled him outside. Shinji winced as this caused his shoulder to bang against the doorframe on his way out, although this pain was quickly overridden by the rocky path he was being pulled over in his bare feet. 

“You’re such a baby,” said Asuka when he voiced his complaints. “Hang on; we’re almost there.” She was guiding him upward toward the edge of the cliff, and it didn’t take long for Shinji to see the cause of all the commotion.

“There it is! See? I _told_ you. Come _on,_ I wanna talk to it and see if it remembers me.” 

A growing crowd of people some holding flashlights, were pushing themselves as closely as possible to the fence at the edge of the cliff to look up into the blank eyes of the creature towering above them. Its form was vaguely humanoid, or at least its visible top half was, with two arms and a bone white, beaked mask with two black eye spots that seemed to serve as a face. The creature appeared to have climbed up the cliffside, with one pitch-black, three-pronged hand gripping the edge for stability. Just as Asuka had described, it had some sort of glowing red sphere embedded in its chest (or whatever its equivalent of a chest was)that was surrounded by a rib like cage of the same bony white material that constituted its “face.” 

“Don’t worry; he’s friendly,” Kensuke’s voice could be heard from somewhere at the front of the group. “It’s okay to come closer.” 

There was a collective cry from the crowd as the creature suddenly heaved itself upward, its black skin straining against its false ribs with the motion. However, whatever material it was made of had some sort of fluid property as well, because as it pulled itself up, its top half arched over the fence and Shinji saw it extend its other hand toward the people in a cupped shape as if requesting something. 

“What’s it doing?” Shinji asked, amazed.

“How should I know? We have to get closer,” said Asuka, and the two of them rushed to close the distance between them and the action. They arrived as part of the steady stream of newcomers attempting to break through the outer barrier of people, but in this case their small stature worked in their favor, and when they weren’t able to skirt the space around people’s legs, Asuka startled them with a good shove to the back of the knees and an “Out of the way!” When they broke through the other side, Shinji immediately regretted it.

“There he is!” shouted a familiar voice, and before he knew quite what was going on, he found himself being smacked in the face with a flying sunflower. 

It turned out that the creature hadn’t been requesting anything at all. In its massive hand, it cradled a blue tarp filled with seawater, in which Nagisa Kaworu was excitedly splashing about. 

“Ikari-kun!” he practically sang. Jumping about in his orange T-shirt, he looked rather like a goldfish trying to escape its bowl. 

Shinji tried to back away, but Kaworu’s massive sibling grew its outstretched arm so that Kaworu was close enough to grab his hand before he could escape ( _germsgermsgerms)_. 

“Ikari-kun,” he said, yelling over the combined murmurings of the crowd, blissfully ignoring the harsh flashlight being shined in his face, “I found a way that I could come to you without having to technically leave the water! I tried it out the first chance I could, and that’s right now! The only problem is that I still can’t really walk around that much, because Sachiel doesn’t want to wreck all your stuff, but there were these nice people here when we climbed up who were going to help me find you, only now you’re here!” 

Kaworu leapt forward to hold Shinji’s other hand in his own, nearly dangling out of Sachiel’s hand as he did so. “They were scared of Sachiel at first, but I got them to stay by talking to them. I said to them, ‘Do you know someone named Ikari Shinji?’ and they said yes, and I said, ‘I’m looking for him,’ and they said why and I said, ‘Because I love him and I have things I want to give him since I love him.’ And then Kensuke and Touji came outside because they saw us from their window, I think, and so now that you and Asuka are here, we have everybody! Hello, by the way, Asuka. Sachiel says hello, too.”

Asuka waved, thrilled at having been acknowledged. Shinji was speechless, which Kaworu seemed to take as a good thing, because he continued to chatter happily away. “Last month, remember, when I told you what my new name was? Last month, Asuka was telling me the story of being married to Ikari-kun, and she was telling me about sunflowers. So I brought sunflowers! Do you like it, Ikari-kun? I have more.” He temporarily let go of one of Shinji’s hands to fish around in the makeshift pool, and when he reemerged he tossed a sopping bunch of sunflowers at Shinji’s feet. They had been forcibly pulled up by the roots, and a few of them still had some clumps of dirt clinging to those roots that the water hadn’t completely washed away. 

“I also have some more things for you, but we have to go get them, so we’ll be right back, okay? Don’t go anywhere.” 

And with that, Sachiel’s fingers closed up around Kaworu to form a protective container, and it fell back from the cliff into the water, causing another thunderclap sound when its body hit the surface. Many of the other residents’ reactions to this were delayed, but the geyser of water that shot upward after the impact startled them into scrambling backward to avoid the spray. 

“It remembers me,” Asuka said to Touji and Kensuke, who had managed to make their way over to her and Shinji. “See? See? I _told_ you.” 

“Shut up,” said Touji. 

“You’re just jealous.” 

“Yeah, well it still talked to us first.”

“Only cause I wasn’t here yet.” 

Meanwhile, the people at the front of the group closest to the children began to pester them with questions.

“I _told_ you; he’s our friend,” Kensuke could be heard saying to his neighbors at the same time Asuka regaled hers with her own history with the creatures: “Yeah, I saw it before, but no one believed me when I told them and I bet they’re all sorry now…” 

Sachiel returned quicker than many people had anticipated, clawing its way back to the top of the cliff in only a few minutes. This time, when it offered its hand again, Kaworu was not inside. Instead, nestled in the tarp were piles of containers: plastic gallons, glass jars, bottles, and other assorted plastic vessels, all filled with clear water. Sachiel slid them gently off the tarp onto the ground, where a few people scooped them up to prevent them from breaking as they rolled off the pile, gazing in astonishment at the contents. Then, the creature dove back into the ocean and returned in under a minute with the tarp once again full of seawater. 

Touji barely had time to get out a “Where’d Kaworu go?” when Sachiel’s “face” seemed to slide back along its body, and in the space between that and its ribs, a horizontal seam opened up wide to reveal [a red tongue and several rows of teeth](http://lady-daedalus.tumblr.com/image/138645820311). When Sachiel lowered the mouth to its hand, Kaworu climbed out from behind the barrier of its teeth and leapt the short distance back into his pool, splashing a few people with the water ( _germsgermsgermsgermsgerms_ ). He popped right back up and shook himself like a dog, and when he was finished, he cocked his head to the side with the smile Shinji had grown to dislike so. 

“Have I gained your favor now, Ikari-kun?” 

Shinji still didn’t say anything, and he had pulled his shirt back up over his nose in a frantic attempt to shield himself from whatever new foreign pathogens Kaworu might have obtained from sitting inside Sachiel’s mouth.

“Where did you get all this?” Asuka asked, peering suspiciously at the water in one of the bottles. 

“Well I was thinking this whole last month about the sort of thing I could give Ikari-kun that he would like, and I remembered that water’s a really big deal for you. And _then_ , I _really_ got the idea when a couple of my other siblings told me that you and Ikari-kun were collecting even more water than usual these past few days, so I went around collecting all the containers I could find and I filled them.” 

“But where did you find clean water?” 

Kaworu jumped up and down in Sachiel’s hand. “It’s seawater! But I cleaned it myself. I can do that. See?” He scooped up some water in his hands, and the people who were able to see it were astounded to watch the water fade from red to pink to colorless. Kaworu tossed the purified water into the air and let the droplets rain down on him and the closest members of the crowd. 

“No more germs now, Ikari-kun!” he said. “So what do you say? Do you like me yet? Hey. Why are you so quiet? You look all red. Is it because it’s so warm out? Are you too warm? Hey, say something, Ikari-kun… 

“… Ikari-kun?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the words of the White Stripes, "I've said it once before but it bears repeating": Poor Karl. He tries so hard.
> 
> Misato was blinded from the explosion of the Second Impact. I've never written a blind character before. Do let me know if I've done anything horribly insensitive, would you? Also, there will be no weird sexual overtones in Misato and Shinji's relationship here, no sirree, not in my house. Just Shinji being a sweetheart with his adoptive mom.
> 
> In the spirit of the Miyazaki universe, Sachiel ended up being a fusion of his original design and No-Face, so Shin-chan better take care not to piss him off, I guess.
> 
> As always, you can come a-kawoshinning with me at lady-daedalus.tumblr.com. Chat me up in the messaging app to talk apocalypse logistics, writing resources, your favorite iteration of Kawoshin, or just to say hi.


	5. I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow, than a man swear he loves me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Karl tries his hand at the courting rituals of the angels, but Karl ain't Qworu.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A small medical emergency temporarily put a hitch in the update schedule, but hopefully a 6700+ word count will partially make up for it?

Kaworu fixed his gaze upon the woman in the oversized yellow t-shirt behind whom Shinji was currently cowering. She had come a bit later than the majority of the crowd; Ritsuko had waited until the traffic in the building had calmed down a bit before walking with her to where all the fuss was happening. 

“Nice pajamas, Misato,” someone yelled.

Misato turned her head toward the source of the noise and shouted back, “Calm your tits; I have shorts on,” and she hiked the hem of her shirt up to prove it whilst the younger members in the group giggled with varying degrees of surreptitiousness, because _ooh_ , naughty words. 

Kaworu signaled to Sachiel to bring him over to this newcomer, because he was getting the feeling that she was going to be a significant marker on his journey to winning Ikari’s heart, and thus he needed to impress her. Once again, Sachiel’s arm grew to accommodate his wishes, and to Kaworu’s immense disappointment, Shinji seemed to shrink back in proportion to his proximity. 

“Hello,” he said to Misato, who wasn’t surprised to hear him, as Ritsuko had hastily informed her of the situation. 

It was at times like these that Misato thought about all the philosophical arguments that reality was all about perception. Sure, none of this business made any sense whatsoever, but if she was perceiving it, then clearly her brain or other unspecified perceptive organs must have a reason for it. Obviously, she thought to herself, her brain had decided to perceive this in order to amuse her, or so she would tell herself for however long it took to come up with a better explanation. And if she didn’t, well, being amused wasn’t such a bad thing. Or maybe this was all an elaborate setup that Ritsuko and Kaji had concocted just to mess with her on her birthday, and there was no gigantic sea monster holding its oddly humanoid youngest sibling in its hand, and it was actually just a kid standing on a box in front of her; that was certainly a possibility. Either way, it was amusing, and they had caught her in a good mood and smelling lavender fresh, so she decided to play along with whatever bizarre machinations were at work here.

“Hello,” she replied pleasantly.

Kaworu bent one of Sachiel’s fingers so that he could prop his elbows on it as he chatted. “Are you Ikari-kun’s mother?” 

“More or less. Who’s asking?” 

Kaworu heard Shinji’s small voice from behind her saying, “Don’t talk to him,” and he scrunched up his face in determination before he continued. “I’m Nagisa Kaworu, although my siblings call me Tabris; that’s Nagisa written with the character that means seashore and Kaworu written like it’s spelled in the Tale of Genji, and I picked my first name after Ikari-kun picked my last name, and I think it’s a very nice name.” 

“Indeed it is,” said Misato. “And very appropriate, too, considering your origins.” 

“Ikari-kun is smart that way,” said Kaworu, and in the background Kensuke and Touji could be heard protesting the false attribution of their intellectual property. However, Kaworu, like the vast majority of the planet at any given time, post-apocalypse included, didn’t much care for the intricacies of copyright infringement, and so he proceeded without a second thought for them. “What’s your name?” he asked Misato.

“Katsuragi Misato.” 

“Oh. That’s a nice name, too.” 

“Why, thank you, Nagisa.” 

Kaworu rested his chin on Sachiel’s finger as well so that he was at the proper level for staring at Misato. “How come you and Ikari-kun have different last names?” 

“You’re certainly very friendly with him for someone who calls him Ikari-kun,” Misato said, smoothly dodging the question. She couldn’t see it, but Kaworu’s eyes lit up and he wiggled around a little in his excitement.

“Yes! I am very friendly with him! But I don’t think he wants to be very friendly with me.” Kaworu craned his neck from side to side, trying to see Shinji’s reaction, but Shinji saw him coming and dodged accordingly, so he settled himself back on his previous resting place, because maybe Shinji’s differently surnamed mother could do a better job of convincing him. “I love him, you know,” Kaworu said, figuring that a straightforward approach was best when presenting oneself to the parent of the object of one’s affections. 

“Really?” Misato said with an exaggerated gasp, which served the dual purpose of humoring Kaworu and hiding her laughter. Ritsuko giggled somewhere to her right.

“Yes. Really. I’m gonna marry him.” (“Another one?” Hikari asked.)

Shinji poked his head out from the safety of Misato’s shirt hem. “Stop saying stuff like that!” he yelled before he made a hasty retreat.

His brief appearance, however, only seemed to encourage Kaworu, who smiled broadly and sat up straight again. “Hello, Ikari-kun! Oh… goodbye again, Ikari-kun! Don’t forget that I love you!” 

“You know,” said Misato, leaning toward him a bit, “Shinji’s already been married twice.” 

“I know. Asuka told me the story of being married to Ikari-kun.” 

“Goodness, it sounds like a folk ballad. Shinji, you didn’t tell me you were famous,” Misato teased. Shinji made indistinct whining noises and attempted to bury his face further into her shirt, so she turned back to Kaworu. “So, since you know the, uh… the story of being married to Ikari-kun, why do you think you would be a good candidate?” 

“Stop talking to him,” Shinji said through the shirt. 

Kaworu wiggled around excitedly again. He had prepared for this question. “Because!” he shouted, before he realized he was getting carried away in his enthusiasm and brought his voice back down to an appropriate volume. This was a very serious conversation for mature people, after all. “Because… he doesn’t need to worry about me not getting along with his friends, since I do that already, and I have fourteen siblings and they’ll protect him and all of you from anything, and I can only be on the surface for three days a month until I turn fifteen, so I’ll spend time with him and then leave before he can get sick of me, and I’ll be very useful while I’m here and I’ll clean your water and make sure your plants grow, and he won’t need to change his name cause he already named me once so he could probably do it again, and I’ll give him things even when it’s not our anniversary, and he won’t be marrying someone who doesn’t love him because I’ll love him forever, and…” 

“Yes, I see you’ve thought this through,” Misato interjected, because she could hear Kaworu rapidly running out of breath and she didn’t want to be responsible for any conditions he might suffer as result of poor oxygenation. Perhaps he didn’t need to worry about that sort of thing, living in the ocean and all, but she didn’t feel like taking that risk today.

“Don’t listen to him,” Shinji said, just as Kaworu asked, “So am I acceptable?” 

“Hmm,” Misato made a big show of pretending to consider his offer. She crossed her arms, tilted her head back, and rhythmically tapped on her chin with all five fingers.

“Please,” Kaworu said, and she imagined him clasping his hands together to the point of crushing them (and she wasn’t wrong). “Please, Katsuragi, if I can’t love him I don’t know what I’ll do.” 

Misato laughed out loud, and so did many of the others gathered around. “Shin-chan, you little femme fatale, I’m finding out so many things about you tonight.” 

Shinji made a noise somewhere between a groan and a scream.

“You seem very sincere, Nagisa,” said Misato, “and I bet Shinji would be lucky to have you.” 

“Misato, _no_ ,” Shinji pleaded. Kaworu perked up, eyes wide. 

“But,” she said, “I think your energy would be better spent on someone who is also interested in you.” 

Kaworu was very quiet. He chewed his lip for a bit, eyes darting around as if tracking his train of thought as it sped between ideas. Then he leaned forward out of Sachiel’s hand, arm outstretched, waving his hand about in supplication. “Ikari-kun,” he said. “Ikari-kun, can I hold your hand?” 

Misato gently nudged Shinji forward. “Don’t worry, I’ll hold on to your other hand,” she said. Shinji inched his way toward the hand Kaworu was offering, which began waving much more animatedly as soon as Kaworu caught sight of him. 

“Don’t say my name,” Shinji said through gritted teeth. To his dismay, this didn’t deter Kaworu in the slightest; rather, Kaworu just shut his mouth and sat back obediently, puppy-like, still beaming brightly enough so as to render all the flashlights unnecessary. 

Shinji stiffly offered up his free hand, and he was surprised when Kaworu gently curled his fingers around it rather than trying to lovingly amputate it. 

“Go away,” Shinji hissed.

“Will you hear what I have to say first?” 

“Sure, if it’ll make you go away.” 

Kaworu clasped his other hand around Shinji’s and brought it up between them to stare at it. The red eyes blinked rapidly, as if trying to process a great amount of input. “You have nice hands.” 

Shinji shifted uncomfortably where he stood.

Kaworu placed his chin in one of the crooks of their joined fingers and continued to stare down Shinji’s arm. “Your hair’s standing up on your arms. Why is that?” 

“Cause your hands are all cold.”

“Oh. It’s cute.” 

“Quit stalling.” 

Kaworu turned his head to the side so that his cheek rested on the spot where his chin had been, which allowed him to stare directly at Shinji’s face. The dark shade of his eyes appeared almost black in the sparse lighting, and very occasionally, a flashlight beam would cross his face and they would flash red again. They softened as Kaworu’s features slid into that expression Shinji detested, and apparently in his time away he had come up with a voice to match. “What’s stalling?” he asked dreamily. 

“Not leaving,” said Shinji.

“Oh,” said Kaworu again. He would say that a lot in the future. “I think I like stalling, then.” He rubbed his cheek against Shinji’s hand. Shinji thought he was getting a bit too comfortable with that gesture. 

“I don’t.” He began to try to worm his fingers away from Kaworu’s grip, which finally seemed to motivate Kaworu to get on with things.

“Ikari-kun,” he said, “Sorry — um… I mean… I don’t know what else to call you… Is it all right if I come here again for the next three days?” 

“I guess I can’t stop you.” Shinji glared. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.” 

“Be nice,” Misato said, and she pulled firmly at his arm.

“Hmph.” 

“Hey, Ikar — um… you,” Kaworu began clumsily. “If I got you to love me, would you marry me then?” 

“That’s not going to happen,” said Shinji, and he turned his head aside with a huff to avoid Kaworu’s gaze. 

“What if I could get you to think I was interesting? Would you at least give me a chance?” 

“If I said yes, would that make you leave?” 

“Mm-hm.” 

“Then you can sure try, but you won’t do it.” 

That was all the encouragement that Kaworu required. “Thank you, Ikari-kun!” he said, apparently having forgotten both the ban on shouting and the ban on referring to Shinji by name. He pulled Shinji toward him. “I’m going to prove myself to you, Ikari-kun. I’ll show you. You’ll see.” Then he bent his head forwardand pressed his face against the back of Shinji’s hand. It took a few moments for Shinji to realize he was trying to kiss it, and he wrenched it away in disgust. 

“You said you’d leave.” 

“Sure thing, Ikari-kun,” said Kaworu, snapping a salute. He tapped on Sachiel’s closest finger, and the group again got to witness the spectacle of its torso splitting open to give way to its teeth. Sachiel lifted its arm into a straight line, and Kaworu readied himself before jumping out of his pool and hopping down the length of Sachiel’s arm to the waiting safety of its mouth. It was a wonder he managed to keep his balance, as Sachiel’s gelatinous skin seemed to ripple with the impact of each step. When Kaworu had very nearly traversed the limb in its entirety, Sachiel gave a little pop of its arm, threw its body back, and caught its brother’s small form in its mouth like a trained dolphin catching a fish. It stood there unmoving, with its torso bent backward at an angle, waiting for something. 

That something was Kaworu clambering up over the crest of its teeth, which in the current position was now the summit of Sachiel’s body. “Goodbye, then! I’ll see you tomorrow!” he shouted, his voice acquiring a slight echo by the time it reached its target. “Don’t forget that I love you!” Pleased at having gone out on this note, Kaworu swung his legs back over so that they were dangling above the crevice between Sachiel’s jaws, and then he dropped himself into it like a pebble falling into a well. The gigantic mouth snapped shut behind him, sealed itself up, and Sachiel’s “face” slid back over the space where it had been while its torso realigned itself. There was another fall, and another deafening crash of a massive body hitting the water, and then silence. After a few seconds of this, though, the spell of Kaworu and Sachiel’s illustrious presence faded like the vestiges of a lightning bolt, and gradually, the normal monotone of cicadas and mosquitoes washed back over Shinji and the others. 

Then everyone promptly began to tease him, and they didn’t stop even after they had all made their way back home. 

 

The buzz from Kaworu’s visit the previous night carried everyone (except Shinji) all the way to the next morning, and the majority of the children had all gotten up shortly after sunrise to wait for his return at the same location. Ritsuko and a handful of other parents joined them, trying their best to force their eyelids open against the insisting tug of sleep and passing their infectious yawns around to one another (the contagious properties of yawns were, unfortunately, impervious to the presence of surgical masks, and Ritsuko was actually wearing hers today). Half of the sun could be seen glimmering above the sea, and the white clouds soaked up the pink and gold like capillaries, taking the colors into themselves. Many of the children had brought full water containers with them, and they were queueing them up into a row in the hopes that Nagisa would clean them; his gifts last night had been much appreciated, but one could never have too much water these days, and they only had three days’ worth of easy access.

“Hey, look! I think that’s him!” said Asuka, who had her fingers and toes curled around the wires halfway up the chain link fence. She had been assigned the role of lookout, partially because of her practice climbing the fence, and partially because she’d been the one picking the roles, and she certainly wasn’t going to give up her “mutant ambassador” title to anyone else. She tried in vain to shoo the rest of the children away when they all swarmed forward to see. 

“Quit pressing me against the fence; I can’t breathe,” Kensuke said to Touji. 

“Tell that to the people behind me,” Touji grunted. Someone’s mother attempted to pull them away from the fence, but she only succeeded in removing the outermost members of the party; further inward, the children all crowded together like barnacles to cling to the good seats.

The telltale signal Asuka had seen had been Sachiel’s white face emerging quietly from the waves in the distance. It stared at the cliff as if assessing the crowd there,just bobbing there silently. Then, when it seemed to decide that they all met whatever obscure criteria governs such beings, its face rolled over to the side, and its entire body followed until the large bony protrusion on its shoulder breached the water. It swam on its side like this, the bone swishing from side to side with its motions in a parody of a dorsal fin cutting through the water. As the depths it traversed grew shallower, the red shade of the sea grew pinker, and it became easier to discern Sachiel’s dark silhouette approaching the cliff from beneath the surface. Once the water became too shallow for Sachiel to swim in without scraping the bottom, it rolled its body over again so it faced downward so that it could transition from swimming to walking. 

The manner in which it stood up mirrored its youngest brother’s, only on a much larger scale; it pushed its body into a standing position with one fluid motion, taking a good amount of water with it, and it began to walk toward the cliff with utter disregard for the small streams running all down its body. Just before Sachiel reached land, it lowered one of its arms to scoop up some water into the same blue tarp from the previous night. Then, it adjusted the shape of its hand into a form more suited for securely holding one’s tiny sibling, and it began to crawl up the cliff face. 

Sachiel reached the top rather quickly, considering one of its hands was unavailable and its climbing cadence duly altered. As soon as the top of its body became visible, the children, who had until now been gradually trying to meld themselves with the fence to get a better look, all ran back a good several meters with shrieks of delight. Sachiel’s face followed shortly after its shoulders, and for a moment it turned back and forth, assessing the best location in which to place itself. Now that there was the benefit of daylight, Asuka, Touji, Kensuke, and the others got to properly marvel at the sheer size of the creature and the way it threw itself forward to bend its torso over the fence. Carefully, so as not to either spill the water in the tarp or knock over any of the myriad water containers lined up on the ground, it lifted its free hand over the fence as well, and held it in front of the space where its mouth would open.

When the red slash of a mouth revealed itself once again, Sachiel bent forward just a bit more, and Kaworu came tumbling out into its hand. He stretched himself out a bit — sitting in someone’s mouth for extended periods of time lent itself to cramped muscles — and afterward, he swam a few small laps on his back, otter-like, wriggling contentedly with a lazy smile on his face. 

The other children saw their opportunity and rushed forward once more to greet him, and when Kaworu detected the shade of their small bodies blocking the sun, he opened his eyes and smiled wider. 

“Ikari-kun?” he asked, sitting up to look about. 

“I think he’s still sleeping,” said Touji. Actually, Shinji had gone into hiding ever since he had fled to the refuge of his own apartment last night, and they all knew this, but none of them knew how to gently break it to Kaworu (and between Touji and Asuka’s personalities, gentility became an exceptionally scarce resource). 

Kaworu sank down a little, and his smile lost a small fraction of its intensity. “I guess it is pretty early,” he said, surveying the group of adults who were still blinking sleepily in the face of everything that was occurring. 

“Hey, um, Kaworu,” Hikari ventured, taking a small, hesitant step toward Kaworu.

“Yes?” 

She worked her way through the others, pushing a sizable plastic basin along the ground. “A couple of us found this in the basement of our building, and we thought we’d bring it to you when you came back so that your brother doesn’t have to hold you out like that all day. Um… if that’s okay with you.” 

Kaworu made an expression that ordinarily might have been described as “looking like he could kiss her,” except everyone there knew he was only interested in kissing Shinji, so they could only think that he looked terribly happy. Of course, that was not a great hurdle to vault, seeing as Kaworu’s moods nearly always vacillated between “happy like a puppy” and “happy like an excited puppy,” with the exception of the two special settings of “excited over Shinji” and “wallowing over Shinji.” But his gratitude at Hikari’s offering still brightened her up, and he tapped on one of Sachiel’s tree-trunk fingers, looking up at it over his shoulder pleadingly. 

“Please, Sachiel, can I? Please, please, please?” He began bouncing up and down to the rhythm of his repeated “please”s, causing the unruly tufts of hair to bob gently.

Sachiel gently shifted its cupped hand so it sat over the basin, and then it turned the tarp over slowly enough so that Kaworu had time to cling to one of its fingers as the water rushed past him. 

“Thank you,” Kaworu chirped, giving Sachiel’s finger a quick, affectionate squeeze before he lowered himself in. He took care to minimize splashing as he did so; he had learned by now that Shinji’s kind didn’t much appreciate that sort of thing. 

The next hour or so was spent much in the same way Shinji and company’s first encounter with Kaworu had been, with all the other children asking questions about Kaworu and his siblings. Some of them were even the same ones that Kaworu had already received that fateful second trip to the surface. 

“Do you have to sleep like sharks? Like, do you die if you don’t stop swimming?” 

“I already asked him that,” said Asuka haughtily.

“It’s okay; I don’t mind,” said Kaworu. “Um, I usually sleep in Sachiel’s mouth, but I don’t think Sachiel really needs sleep. I’m not sure any of my older siblings do.” 

“What happens if he eats something while you’re in there?” 

Kaworu shrugged. “I dunno. It’s never happened before.”

“Isn’t that gross?” 

“It’s kinda normal for me, so I don’t really think about it.” 

“How old is Sachiel?” another girl asked, thrusting her hand in the air like she was in class. 

“Somewhere between 150 and 200, I think?” Kaworu basked in the collective _ooh_  that resulted from this answer. 

“Are you gonna live to be that old?” 

“Probably. We live to be around 300. Sometime I’m going to have to figure out how I’m going to stay married to Ikari-kun that long, but for right now I’m just focusing on getting him to love me. Have I told you about how much I love him?”

During this interview, the children nearest to Kaworu had been passing him the water that needed cleaning, which he accepted without complaint. The first time he performed this trick, all questions ceased so that everyone could get a good look now that it was daytime. He wrangled the heavy jug up and over the side of the basin so that it was sitting in his lap, and he stared at it intently, a bit cross-eyed. Slowly, the red inside receded in a simulation of the gradient between the deep water and the shallows that Sachiel had crossed earlier. Kaworu focused a bit harder, wrinkled his nose, and before long, there was no color at all. 

“Your eyes are gonna get stuck like that if you don’t take a break,” Asuka said. “Shinji’s not gonna like you if your eyes are all weird.” 

Kaworu squeaked and the jug that he’d been trying to haul back over to the outside of his tub slipped back down. 

“But Shinji doesn’t like him anyway,” said Kensuke, which only agitated Kaworu further. 

“ _No_ ,” he moaned, pulling the neck of his t-shirt up and over his head. “No, don’t say things like that.” He shook his head, although the others could only make out the outline of his face moving against the shirt and the side-to-side motion of his cowlick sticking out the top.

“Way to go, Asuka,” said Touji.

“Shut up.”

“Hey, Kaworu, if Shinji doesn’t come out here by the time you’re finished with all these water containers, we’ll take you to him, okay?” 

“We will?” asked Asuka. Hikari quickly shushed her. 

Kaworu poked his head out a little. “Really?”

Touji and a good number of the other children nodded enthusiastically. 

“Okay,” said Kaworu, resigned. He worked his head back out of the shirt, the neck sitting awkwardly around his collarbones now that it had been stretched, and the whole process began anew.

Around the fourth or so time he repeated his performance, the audience had gotten accustomed to it, and so they settled back into their rounds of interrogation. To his credit, Kaworu managed to work quite a decent rhythm into his task, timing himself so that he could purify the water during the time he didn’t need to respond. However, maintaining such a high level of concentration quickly sapped his energy, and around the time somebody was asking him to say something in mutant, he had silently nodded off and sunk down into his tub.

“He’s drowning!” one of Hikari’s younger sisters cried, pulling at Hikari’s skirt urgently. 

“Don’t be stupid; he lives in the water,” said Asuka, which made Hikari bristle in sisterly defense.

“Sorry,” Kaworu murmured sleepily, effectively cutting off their argument before it could grow into something unmanageable. He used the side of the basin to keep his head upright while he spoke, staring blearily at the group of nervous faces. “I used up a lot cleaning the water.” Ritsuko couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t bother to specify what exactly he had used a lot of. 

“ ‘M gonna take a nap for a li’l bit,” he said, and slid back underneath the surface. 

Kensuke and Asuka leaned over the sides of the basin, butting heads a bit, and they could see bubbles rising up from the ball Kaworu had curled himself into. They broke when they made contact with the surface, giving it a steady rippling effect. 

“What now?” Asuka pouted. 

 

When Kaworu woke up, he saw the rest of the children all crowded around the fence at the edge of the cliff. They were playing some sort of game wherein they would throw rocks over the fence into Sachiel’s mouth, and then Sachiel would spit them out like watermelon seeds in an arc above and behind it into the water. It was currently Kensuke’s turn. He had a sizable specimen that he had to hold in both his hands, and he gave a few practice swings, bending his legs before he threw the rock upward with a grunt. His throw was a bit low, so it ended up catching the very top of the fence, but Sachiel quickly snapped it up before it could fall. The children cheered.

“Hey, look, he’s awake,” said Hikari, and they waited just long enough for Sachiel to finish the current round before they all migrated back over to his side.

Kaworu watched them carefully as they approached, and when he had accounted for all of the arriving people he looked quite disillusioned. No one was surprised when the first words out of his mouth were a sorrowful, “Ikari-kun still isn’t here.” 

“Oh… yeah… sorry, Kaworu,” Touji said lamely.

“How am I supposed to get him to love me if he won’t even see me?” Kaworu asked, fidgeting anxiously where he sat.

Hikari could see all the components for a perfect tantrum beginning to gather, and she was quick to offer to bring Kaworu closer to the building where Shinji lived.

“Yes,” Kaworu said without hesitation. “Only Sachiel can’t take me cause otherwise he’ll break stuff, probably.”

“We can carry you,” said Touji, raring at the opportunity to show off what he esteemed to be his impressive upper body strength.

Hikari flicked a nervous look toward the place where Sachiel was looming. Even if it was a friendly sort of loom, it was still unnerving. “Is Sachiel gonna be mad if we move you?” 

“It’s okay,” said Kaworu, and he tapped confidently on his temple. “Sachiel will know if I get in trouble. All my siblings can hear each other.” 

“Okay, then,” said Hikari, and she skipped over to the adults to recruit them for the task, stopping the conversation Ritsuko had been having with her adoptive mother (“Do you ever think about how weird reading is? Like, ‘ah yes, it’s time for one of my favorite pastimes, looking at a series of symbols that make mind pictures that I can sort of see but not really.’ No, I’m not on anything. But that brings up the interesting logistical question of where I _would_  obtain recreational drugs if I were”). 

Ten minutes later, while Ritsuko and a few of the other adults shuffled toward their building carrying the basin like a crude sedan chair between them, Kaworu looked up at Ritsuko and asked, “Do you think that maybe Ikari-kun just forgot I was here today?” 

Asuka snorted from where she was trotting at Ritsuko’s heels. Ritsuko said, “I don’t think anyone could possibly forget about you being here.” 

 

Indeed, it was nigh impossible for any of the people living in Shinji’s community to forget Kaworu was there for several reasons. The first was that, well, it’s not often that your little group gets to play host to a 150 to 200 year old aquatic eldritch abomination and its youngest brother. The second reason was that said aquatic eldritch abomination’s youngest brother was incredibly useful, as he had promised the previous night when he had been pleading with Misato for Shinji’s hand in marriage. The third reason was that Kaworu was very loud. 

“What is that… unholy screaming?” Misato yelled to one of their neighbors across the hall, although it was a bit of a pointless question, seeing as both of them had their hands pressed firmly over their ears. 

It appeared everyone else in the vicinity had the same question on their minds, and when they asked, Kaworu simply said, “It’s a song. The Lilin like to be serenaded during courtship, don’t they?” 

“A song,” Kensuke whispered, horrified. 

“But why?” Asuka asked. 

“Because I’m courting Ikari-kun, of course! And I need to get his attention, so I got one of my siblings to teach me how to sing.” 

“Which one?” 

Kaworu seemed to pick up on the judgmental tone in their voices, and he crossed his arms proudly over his chest as he said, “Ramiel. Do you want to hear more of it?” And he sucked in quite a substantial portion of the surrounding oxygen to wind up for another verse. “AaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAA—“

Asuka rushed forward and shoved her hands over his mouth before he could break a window. Kaworu frowned and sank down into the basin a little, dejected. 

That same day, the perpetual background drone of the summer insects was interrupted and the people taken aback a second time by another series of cries, although these were less of the “hell song of the damned” variety and instead leaned more toward the “small, pathetic, lovesick whale” part of the crying spectrum. To cap it all off, the dramatic interplay of colors between the setting sun and the encroaching dusk lent a very melodramatic tint to the whole experience.

“Shinji, would you please, please just go outside and make him stop crying?” Ritsuko begged from the doorway of Shinji’s room. Hikari was standing beside her, the pair of them having been sent as the group representative of the “Let Me Love You, Dammit” initiative (Asuka had named it) to bring Shinji outside.

“No,” Shinji said from somewhere beneath the bundle of his blankets.

“Shinji, please,” Misato’s voice said from somewhere behind her.

“No.” 

The conversation bounced back and forth between the three of them this way with the occasional chime-in from Hikari until Ritsuko narrowed her eyes and said, “If you don’t stop him, the neighbors are going to come over here, and they’re going to complain.”

The blankets shifted aside just enough to reveal a single, glaring eye, and Ritsuko knew she had hit her target. Shinji had never been very good when it came to confrontation.

“Uuuuuugh, do I have to?” he sulked. 

“Well,” Ritsuko said, pretending to examine her nails disinterestedly, “You don’t _have_ to. Strictly speaking, you don’t _have_ to do anything. It’s just that me, Misato, Hikari, and probably everyone else think that it would be a terribly productive use of your time…” At this point, a particularly well-timed sequence of crying broke through the window and intruded very forcefully into their eardrums. 

“Ikari-kun,” Kaworu could be heard bawling. “Ikari-kuuuun…” 

“Fine,” Shinji said curtly as he threw the covers off with an angry flourish.

He marched outside to the sight of Kaworu dangling limply over the side of the basin with only his legs remaining submerged inside. He briefly considered how uncomfortable that must be, and then he remembered that he didn’t care. For some reason, Kaworu was covered in bits of grass, clumps of which were also floating in the stagnant water around him. Green blades of grass and assorted leaves were also scattered on the ground in a vaguely circular shape around him. 

Kaworu sobbed another “Ikari-kun,” into the plastic. 

“What do you want?” 

Kaworu’s head jerked upward in his excitement and he fell forward onto the ground, catching himself with his feet still in the basin. 

“Ikari-kun,” he sniveled, and turned himself over so that he was lying face up with his knees slung over the edge. His face was flushed, partially from all the crying and partially from hanging upside down so long. Clumsily, he dried off his face with the sleeve of his shirt and looked back up at Shinji with dewy eyes. “Ikari-kun, last time when I was here and I was telling your friends about how I love you, they asked how I knew, and I said that I felt this sticky feeling in my chest like something was being squeezed, and I just talked to Hikari and she told me what that feeling was, and do you know what she said, Ikari-kun? She said I’m being _crushed_. My insides are getting crushed and I’m probably gonna die, Ikari-kun. Ikari-kun, please, you’re the love of my life and if you don’t love me back I’ll _die_.” He burst into sobs again, and he threw both of his arms over his eyes for dramatic effect.

“I just told him he _had_ a crush,” Hikari said, holding up her hands, eyes wide. She’d been telling the same thing to Kaworu ever since the crying had started, but Kaworu’s mind had rather firmly latched onto the initial impression and the pair of them had run off together never to return to the land of reason.

“See?” Shinji said, pointing at Hikari. “She said you have a crush. It doesn’t mean what you think it means, and you’re not dying, so calm down.” 

“No, you don’t know that, Ikari-kun.”

“I told you to stop saying my name so much.” 

“I know what I feel and it’s my chest being crushed and I’m going to die and there’s only going to be fourteen of my siblings because I’ll be dead.” 

Shinji resisted the urge to pull at his hair in frustration. Clearly, arguing semantics with Kaworu would only end in the both of them hitting their heads against the metaphorical brick wall until they really were dead. He tried to divert Kaworu with a different subject.

“Why are you all covered in grass?” he asked. 

“Because,” Kaworu replied through his hiccuping, “you didn’t like the sunflowers, so I asked Asuka what other flowers Lilin liked, and she told me that she read in a book that grass means you love another boy only I don’t think it’s working on you.” 

“Hey, I wasn’t lying,” Asuka snickered, holding up the book on flower language that she had nicked from Ritsuko. She held it open to the page with the “grass” entry on it and pointed to the “homosexual love” listing.

Shinji squinted. “Is that for real?”

“I dunno. But it’s the only book we have on it, and it’s funny.” 

“I hate you,” he said, ignoring Ritsuko’s half-hearted command to “Be nice.” 

“Hate you too,” Asuka sang, blowing a kiss. “I was also gonna tell him about that thing some animals do where the male pees on the female if he likes her. You’re lucky Ritsuko stopped me.”

“What does it take?” Kaworu whimpered beneath his arms.

“Hey, you should use this to ask for stuff,” said Asuka conspiratorially. “Say you want him to bring you, like, a hundred different tapes and a hundred batteries for your tape player before you’ll see him again.” 

“I don’t like him, but I’m not that mean,” said Shinji. At his feet, Kaworu let out another wail at the words “I don’t like him.” “Plus, his brother would probably eat me.” 

“Sachiel would never,” Kaworu said, offended. Then he paused, and he had that look on his face that meant he was carefully considering something. He slowly moved his gaze upward from Shinji’s feet to where his tape player was sticking out of his pocket. “That’s your tape player, right?” 

Shinji’s hand moved reflexively to cover it. “Yeah,” he said suspiciously. 

“It plays music, right?” 

“Yeah…”

Kaworu’s brow furrowed. “You like music.” 

Shinji clamped his lips together, suddenly very wary of saying that he liked anything in front of Kaworu in case Kaworu tried to use it, but it seemed too late for that now. 

Kaworu’s breathing calmed, although it still stuttered from time to time. “Hey. Ikari-kun.” 

“What?” Shinji groaned, dreading what would follow.

Kaworu rolled back over and pushed himself up so he was kneeling in the basin again. He wiped the remaining dampness from his cheeks with his now dry shirtsleeve. “If I learned about music, would you like me then?” 

Shinji didn’t respond and watched Kaworu pick a few grass clippings off his shoulder. 

“If I could learn things about music, and I knew things like that song you were humming the first time I saw you, would that impress you?” 

Shinji buried his face in his hands. After a long silence, he finally said, “If you learned about music, and you only talked to me about that, and you quit saying you love me, then maybe I’d hang out with you.” 

A little frisson of excitement seemed to pass through Kaworu’s entire body, beginning from his feet and running all the way up to make even his hair look a bit perkier. “Do you really mean that, Ikari-kun?” 

“And you also have to stop saying my name so much,” Shinji quickly added to his list of conditions. “I’m gonna keep count, and if you say it too many times I’m gonna leave.” 

“Okay. But you know, Ikari-kun,” said Kaworu, who was quickly falling back into his natural smiling expression, “Just stopping me from saying that I love you isn’t gonna stop it from being true.” 

Shinji let out a small scream of exasperation and turned to stalk off again now that he had carried out his duty, but Kaworu stood with a splash and said, “Wait! Don’t leave yet!” 

“What now?” 

“Before you leave, and before I have to stop saying your name and how much I love you, can I hold your hand again? I’ll go away right after.” 

“Whatever,” said Shinji, swiveling around and pushing his hand toward Kaworu. Kaworu took it the same way he had the night before, clasping it with both hands. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Ikari-kun,” he said. “Don’t forget that I love you.” And he pulled Shinji forward a bit to peck him on the cheek, right above his mask.

Shinji shoved him away and ran back inside, not stopping to think about how Kaworu had figured out kissing since the last time he’d tried that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title comes from Much Ado about Nothing.  
> As always, you can come a-kawoshinning with me on tumblr at lady-daedalus.tumblr.com
> 
> Oh go on, play the "feed my insecure need for external validation" game. There will be prizes.


	6. Small, pathetic, lovesick whale seeks boyfriend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Kaworu wears many hats: sunflower soothsayer, advice column write-in, and eldritch Nancy Drew, to name a few.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just looked at the date of the last update, and then I looked at today's date..................... how......... did that happen?  
> Tell you what, how about I never make promises about updates again, and then when one shows up it'll be a pleasant surprise for all of us.

In the darkness of the early morning, Kaworu wriggled the fingers of his free hand over the sunflower he held like he was about to perform a card trick (albeit a card trick with no audience save Sachiel, who had seen many much more impressive things in its lifetime). “He…” Kaworu dragged the ‘e’ out into a long crescendo before finally breaking the tension with a quick “… loves me!” and letting his fingers descend upon the helpless sunflower to rip off a chunk of the topmost petals, which he tossed aside, uninterested in them now that they had served their purpose. They landed, effete, on top of the book he’d recently borrowed from Ritsuko, which in turn was lying on top of a small volume of popular classical sheet music. Kaworu had stacked the two like this right next to his basin the night before as a sort of good luck charm; he had been hoping that this arrangement would amplify any beneficial powers they might offer. 

“He… loves me not.” He repeated the process with the sunflower with the next chunk over, moving in a clockwise direction. Whenever it came time for the “he loves me not” sections, Kaworu would rip them off as quickly as possible, like a bandage, and pout momentarily before hurriedly moving along to the part of the story that he knew was coming next, which just so happened to be his favorite part, and it continued to be his favorite part each of the four times he came back to it. When he had worked a little more than three quarters of the way around the sunflower’s available perimeter, he came to that most thrilling, heart-pounding portion of the narrative, grasped the still sizable remaining portion of the petals and tore them away with a flourish, exclaiming “He loves me!” as he threw them straight upward before he disappeared into his personal pool to squeal to himself and kick his legs against the side in excitement. 

“See, Sachiel?” he said, once he had resurfaced with sunflower dregs stuck to his hair and water dripping down his face. He picked up the stem where he’d dropped it (it still had little yellow pieces of petal attached by the base here and there, a testament to Kaworu’s sophomoric technique)and presented it proudly to Sachiel, who had stretched its face even further over the fence than usual to hover over him. 

Kaworu continued to bask in the security of botanical divination, that great and respected field, until he felt a gentle prod from Sachiel in his mind that told him he had a visitor. He jumped up to greet them, slipping and falling over in his haste, but he sprang right back up to see his guest, who hadn’t been at the reception of his advent the day before. 

“Hello!” he announced to the disembodied, bobbing flashlight beam approaching his basin. He waited until he could make out the figure of its owner before he began the rest, straightening his posture and sucking in his stomach in an effort to expand his chest (enunciation was key in these first impressions). “My name is Nagisa Kaworu. That’s Nagisa written with the character that means seashore and Kaworu spelled like in the Tale of Genji, and I picked my first name after Ikari Shinji picked my last name, only just so you know, it probably won’t be my last name for very long because Ikari-kun is the love of my life, and I’m going to marry him and then I’m going to be Mister Ikari Kaworu, but I’m not allowed to say that in front of him because he doesn’t love me yet, so don’t tell him I told you!” He’d refined this speech last night. After receiving a rotating crowd of visitors throughout the course of the day, and after he’d gotten a bit frustrated answering the same questions for each new wave, he decided that he required a thoroughly informative opening statement to recite so as to facilitate the process in the future. “I live in the sea and I have fourteen siblings; yes, Sachiel’s one of them, he is between 150 and 200 years old and no, I don’t know why we don’t look alike, but he’s very friendly so you don’t need to be scared. It’s very nice to meet you!” he threw in at the end, throwing himself forward into a clumsy bow. “What’s your name?” 

“Holy shit,” he heard the man say under his breath before he introduced himself as “Kaji Ryouji. It’s nice to meet you too, Nagisa Kaworu. Ritsuko was, uh… really not kidding about you,” Kaji said, looking back and forth between Kaworu and Sachiel. 

“I like Ritsuko,” said Kaworu. “She’s nice. Are you friends with her?”

“Yep. Her and Misato. But Misato would probably get mad if she heard my name associated with hers, so how about I won’t tell Shinji your wedding plans if you don’t tell Misato I said we were friends?” 

Kaworu narrowed his eyes. “If you’re friends, how come I didn’t see you with either of them yesterday?” 

“Turns out it’s not entirely responsible behavior if you up and leave a bunch of defenseless old people by themselves, even if there’s a very interesting visitor on the premises. I finally convinced Ritsuko to take the really early morning shift for me, since nothing usually happens and she has to be up early anyway to go collect water from the grass.” 

Kaworu looked a bit put out when he received this news. “But… I already get water for them. Why does she need to do that?” 

Kaji shrugged and sat down to make Kaworu feel less intimidated by the height difference — this was a completely unnecessary gesture; Kaworu had more than enough chutzpah to temporarily fill the space into which he’d grow. “I think it’s probably force of habit.” 

“Oh. Well, you should tell her when you go back that she doesn’t need to do that, because that’s what I’m here for. Um, for the next two days, anyway.” 

“Will do,” said Kaji with a relaxed, two-fingered salute. He set aside the basket he’d been carrying and placed his flashlight on its side by Kaworu’s basin, which illuminated the translucent plastic and gave it a subtle glow that resembled the one emanating from Sachiel’s chest. 

“So… did you want to talk to me about something?” Kaworu asked, bending forward a bit to give Kaji his best “expectant owl” stare. Kaji leaned back in response, apparently having been pushed over by the sheer force of Kaworu’s character. He looked back and forth between Kaworu and Sachiel’s dual inscrutable expressions and decided that it was, after all, possible to see the family resemblance. 

“Uh… nothing in particular. Although, I was wondering how many of the rumors I heard about you were true. You’re a popular kid, you know that?”

“I don’t care about being popular. I only care about Ikari-kun.” 

“So I hear. I guess that one was true, then.” 

“What one?” Kaworu asked, finally sitting down as well to make himself more comfortable. 

“The one about your very impressive one-track mind. Not much to do in the sea, then?” 

“Not really.” Kaworu amused himself by gently rocking from side to side as he spoke, then reversing his rhythm to try to stop the waves he generated. “I mean, since I was always living there before, I never really thought about it, but now that I’m here I’m finding out about all these other things to do, and that’s exciting, but then I also get disappointed when I think about how now I have to wait until I’m fifteen to try to do it all.” 

“Well,” Kaji said, “If it helps, I have something you can try right now, unless Misato’s already given you some.” He reached over to his basket and produced a watermelon. “Although — and this is something you’re not to tell Misato I said — mine’s better than hers, anyway.” 

“You sure do want me to keep a lot of secrets,” said Kaworu, eyeing the watermelon cautiously as if he were expecting it to hatch. 

“Two is hardly a lot,” Kaji replied with an exaggerated frown.

“Still, now I have to come up with another one to make you keep for me so that we’re even.” 

“Fair enough,” said Kaji, before he laid the watermelon out on a towel to begin slicing it open. 

 

“It’s not as good as ham,” Kaworu pronounced through his first mouthful, “but I guess it’s still pretty good.” 

“There’s not a whole lot of things that are as good as ham, so I’ll take that as a compliment.” 

As they worked their way down their first slices, Kaji tried to teach Kaworu the fine art of spitting watermelon seeds, but instead of expelling them cleanly like Kaji did, Kaworu just got them stuck to his lip and ultimately ended up picking them off from there to flick them into the grass. 

“Sachiel can do something kind of like that,” he said, around his sixth or so failure. “People throw him rocks and we see how far he can spit them. You wanna see?” 

“Um…” Kaji began, shrinking back a little when Sachiel narrowed its gaze from Kaji and Kaworu’s general area to Kaji specifically. “Maybe some other time.” 

“Are you scared of him?” 

“To be honest, kind of.” 

Kaworu gave a small “aw” of discouragement. He tossed his melon rind aside and sat back with an extraordinarily sober expression for an eight year old, bouncing his leg up and down in the water while he thought. Kaji discreetly shifted the watermelon over a bit to avoid splashing. 

“Oh! Right. Sorry,” said Kaworu, noticing this and setting out rather expeditiously to clean the water in his tub. Since the volume of water was considerably larger than his previous sample sizes, it took more effort, and at the point where the Kaworu’s face began turning red (about fifteen seconds or so after he had begun a sustained, monotonal concentration hum and ten seconds after he had begun subtly quivering all over), Kaji cut him off with a concerned, “Hey, don’t hurt yourself.” 

Kaworu’s breath came rushing out and his skin faded back into its unnatural pallor, although a slight pink tinge lingered in his cheeks to match the new, lighter shade of the water. He panted a bit, then suddenly popped back up to say, “Hey! You wanna see another thing I can do?” 

He picked up another sunflower from the pile on the ground and reproduced his newly acquired trick for Kaji. 

“I’m not sure you’ve got that quite right,” Kaji informed him gently. “I think you’re supposed to pick them off one at a time like this.” He selected a flower of his own and demonstrated the first few “he loves me/he loves me not” cycles. “See, that way, it’s more like a game since you don’t know which one you’ll land on.” 

Kaworu squinted in confusion. “But why would you do that?” 

Kaji just shrugged.

“What happens if you get one result on one flower, but then you try it again and get the opposite one? What does that mean? Whoever made that up didn’t think it through.” 

“Well, just try it once and see if you like it,” said Kaji, offering up the remainder of his sunflower. 

Kaworu gripped it in both hands, the wrinkles in his expression changing from confusion wrinkles to incredulity wrinkles. “How many did you pick off already?” 

“Maybe four?” 

“Cause I don’t wanna land on the wrong one because you counted wrong.” Kaworu leaned over as far as he could to inspect Kaji’s sparse discard heap. When he had verified that, indeed, Kaji had not shortchanged him, he gingerly plucked off the first “he loves me,” holding the extracted petal with only the extremities of his fingers and gently placing it aside, just in case the flower held a grudge against him about its unfortunate predecessors. 

“I don’t know if I can do this,” he would say every few “he loves me not”s. “Don’t laugh! If he doesn’t love me, then I’ll never get to marry him! Not now, or next month, or next year, or even when I’m ten, or fifteen, or _eighteen_ , or _nineteen_ , or…” 

“Think of it this way,” said Kaji. “Even if it doesn’t land on ‘he loves me’ this time, that doesn’t mean it’ll still land on that tomorrow. Because these only tell you what he’s feeling right now, right?” 

Kaworu gave a nonverbal whine of concession and plucked off the next ‘he loves me’ with his eyes firmly squeezed shut. 

When only a small cluster remained, Kaworu broke out into a sudden encore of his concentration hum. “Mmmmmmmmmmmm,” he droned, pressing the center of the sunflower into his face as if he could divine its contents that way. “Mmmmmmmmmmmm…”

“You okay there?” 

Kaworu opened his left eye. “I’m nervous.” 

“It’s only a game; it doesn’t mean anything.” 

“That’s not what you were saying before!” Kaworu emerged to say plaintively, before he quickly covered his face again. “Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…” Finally, without moving the flower from its position over his eyes, he grasped for the last, climactic section and began swiftly and cleanly pulling the petals off with a gusty exhale of “IlovehimIlovehimIlovehimIlovehimIlovehimIlovehimIlovehim.” He threw the thoroughly vanquished, empty stalk to the ground triumphantly.

“That’s… one way to go about it,” said Kaji, picking up one of the nearest petals and spinning it between his thumb and forefinger idly. 

“I was so worried,” said Kaworu, who was beginning to burrow his face underneath his shirt collar again while he wrung it between his fingertips. “I want him to like me so much.” Suddenly, he dropped the material of his shirt to say, “Do you think he’d like me if I covered myself in these? The grass didn’t work, but maybe I’m supposed to use a different plant.” He bent over as far as he could, one leg sticking out awkwardly, as he used his wet fingertips to pick up as many stray sunflower petals as possible. Once he had collected a small handful, he began attempting to stick them to his hair, sulking when they blew off with a passing slight breeze. 

“I think,” Kaji offered, “that part of your problem is making your goal too big.” 

“How so?” Kaworu asked, puzzled.

“Cause, see, you keep saying you wanna marry him — ”

“I do want to marry him! Because I’m pretty sure that I love him!” A single yellow petal that had been adhered to Kaworu’s cheek peeled off at the top half and dangled like that inelegantly before Kaworu pulled it off the rest of the way. He couldn’t have it undermining his image, after all, not during such important, purposeful declarations of something as important and purposeful as True Love. 

“You’re only pretty sure?” Kaji asked teasingly; unfortunately, figuring out teasing hadn’t been quite as high on Kaworu's priority list at figuring out kissing, so the intention went quite unnoticed. 

“I’m sure!” Kaworu yelled, gripping the edge of the basin and squeezing as hard as he could. “I’m positive,” he added, because he’d discovered such an addendum was a common speech pattern among his Lilin peers when one wanted to express how very certain one was (“Kaworu, are you _sure_ Sahaquiel wouldn’t win in a fight with Zeruel?” “Yep.” “ _Positive_?” “Yeah, cause Sahaquiel’s not a fighter. Anyway, why would they be fighting each other in the first place?”).

“Oh, well, if you’re positive, then,” Kaji pretended to concede. “As I was saying, you keep saying you wanna marry him, right? But that’s a really, really big goal, and even if it happens some day, you’re probably gonna get discouraged along the way cause it seems so far off.” 

“I am willing to wait for Ikari-kun.” 

“Yes, I thought you might say something like that.” 

“Because I am.” 

“Yes. Only, I think it would be easier for you in the meantime if you took that really big goal and, you know…” Kaji held up his hands and pantomimed shrinking the space between them in lieu of finishing his sentence.

“You want me to crush him back?” Kaworu looked horrified. 

“…What?”

“I would never put Ikari-kun through that,” Kaworu announced sanctimoniously, “and even if I wanted to, I couldn’t, cause the only reason I’m getting crushed is that Ikari-kun doesn’t love me, so I probably don’t have the ability to crush Ikari-kun back at all, since I love him already and everything.” 

“No, I’m telling you that I think you should try breaking your goal up into smaller pieces.” 

Kaworu evaluated this proposal, pondering the educational merits of letting Kaji continue. “As long as one of the pieces isn’t crushing him,” he decided. “Then okay.” 

“Right, so you have this big goal of marrying him, and then out of that you make smaller ones that are easier to reach, like…” Kaji began counting them off on his fingers. “Like, getting him to hold your hand, and then getting to call him by his first name, and then getting him to be your boyfriend—”

“What’s a boyfriend?”

“It’s, um,” Kaji held up the index finger of his right hand, then mirrored the action with his left, holding the two firmly apart, “when you like someone—” here he crooked the right finger several times as if in a bizarre greeting, “and they like you back—” a twin finger wag from the left, “and then you want everyone to know that you like each other, so you call each other… boyfriends.” He concluded by bringing the two sides together in a sweeping motion, making a little clicking noise with his tongue when they made contact right before “boyfriends”. 

“Boyfriend,” Kaworu echoed in amazement. He tried the term out again, and decided he liked the flavor. “Boyfriend! I wanna be his boyfriend!” 

“Yeah, there you go. And then you take that goal and break _that_ into smaller ones, and you just keep going from there until things look manageable.” 

But Kaworu wasn’t much interested in the finer points of project management and productivity; he was currently preoccupied with concocting a list of several dozen different ways to fit the phrase “Ikari-kun’s boyfriend” into conversation. He’d hidden his face again, this time taking up refuge behind his hands, where Kaji could hear him _ooh_ ing and _aah_ ing to himself with each new addition to the list. “Hey!” he said, lowering his hands just far enough to look hopefully at Kaji. “You said… when you want everyone to know you like someone, you call each other boyfriends, so does that mean I’m Ikari-kun’s boyfriend?” 

“Ah, well…”

“I mean,” Kaworu quickly revised, “I know that he’s not _my_ boyfriend, cause he doesn’t like me yet, but can I still be _his_ boyfriend?” 

“Whatever floats your boat, I guess. Er — I guess you wouldn’t really need a boat, but you catch my drift.”

Kaworu’s hands went to the sides of his shirt and he began flapping them a little in his excitement. “Mmmmmmmm okay, okay, I’ve figured out what my secret for you is, then.” 

“My lips are sealed,” Kaji said, and he gave an “ok” signal with his fingers.

“No, you have to let me tell you properly, or else it doesn’t count,” said Kaworu, waving him closer. 

“Oh, right.” 

“So Kaji,” said Kaworu formally, and his waving became more insistent, “would you like to hear a secret?” 

“I would love to hear a secret.” Kaji inclined his ear toward Kaworu compliantly. 

Kaworu leaned forward onto his tiptoes, hands on the edge of the basin for balance, and stage whispered, “The secret is that I am Ikari-kun’s boyfriend, but he is not my boyfriend, so you can’t tell anyone until we are both boyfriends together.”

 

It was shortly after Kaji departed to relieve Ritsuko of her duties (“Where’s that Misato friend of yours? She’s so pretty; she doesn’t need to wear makeup. You, on the other hand, you need it.” “I’ll keep that in mind, Toki-san.” “She and Kaji need to hurry up and get married.” “I’ll tell her that, Toki-san.” “You know, I was a virgin bride when I was married.” “That’s great, Toki-san.”) that the small anomaly concealing itself in the nearby grass made itself known. The small anomaly’s name was Rei Ayanami, and unlike the vast majority of Kaworu’s visitors, conversation was not on her agenda. Ostensibly, nothing at all was on her agenda, as Kaworu discovered once he had given his introduction speech and stood anxiously before her expressionless gaze for her response. 

“What’s your name?” 

Rei’s eyelids gave a single-blink shutter imitation, like she was capturing the image of Kaworu for analysis in order to produce a clinical, accurate response. “Ayanami Rei.” 

Kaworu gasped with realization and pointed, rather rudely, at her. “You were married to Ikari-kun. Oh noooo,” he groaned, tipping over onto his side to let the water muffle his noises of frustration. 

“No,” he repeated, wiping his face dry when he resurfaced. “No, this isn’t fair; I _knew_ I wasn’t prettier than Asuka, but I thought I could at least be second prettiest, only now you’re here and I can’t be anymore and I still don’t know about music. Now what am I supposed to do?” 

Blink. “I don’t know.” Her eyes fell upon the many crudely dissected sunflowers littering the area, and she picked up one of the barren stalks to prick it with her fingernails. 

Inching himself as close to this strange new phenomenon as he could, Kaworu stretched his neck to try to make out her facial features, and after several seconds of squinting he said, “You’re the same as me.” 

Blink. Rei paused her new activity of peeling fibers from the sunflower stem and stared at him, fingertips freshly stained with sap and chlorophyll thoroughly embedded beneath the nails. “Hm?”

Standing and receiving the full impression of her stare only seemed to confirm Kaworu’s previous conjecture, as he nodded confidently and said, “Yep. We have the same eye color. And see?” He threw out the arm closest to her to compare their chalky skin tones. “So I guess it’s not so bad, then. Cause Ikari-kun married you, so he must’ve liked you, and if I look like you, then maybe he’ll like me better.” He grinned toothily at the arrival ofthis newest hypothesis. 

“Okay,” said Rei disinterestedly, and she resumed picking at the gouge she’d made in the sunflower stem like it was a scab. 

“So… can you give me any advice? To make him like me?” 

“No.” 

Kaworu stewed, listening to the slight scratching sounds she produced while he tried to think of something to say.

“I’m not going to lose to you,” he declared, stretching himself up on his toes to make himself seem taller. 

Rei’s face remained marvelously lacking in expression. “Okay,” she said simply, before she turned — deliberately, rather than spinning on her heel as Asuka would have — and slipped away, not even breaking her careful stride when she bent down to collect several more empty sunflower stalks on her way. 

 

“Ikari-kun!” Kaworu piped as he pushed himself forward, arms outstretched. He had sprinkled a small handful of grass over his hair before Shinji’s arrival today, just in case. 

Shinji had come to him this morning, because he knew Kaworu was going to be carried back into — for lack of a better term, “town” — later today, and he wanted to avoid an audience. His eyebrow twitched at Kaworu’s zealous appellation, and he unsheathed a drying marker from its cap as he approached. He tried to dash off an emphatic line on the back of his hand, but the marker had barely any ink left in it, so he ended up scrubbing it back and forth until he eked out a faded, patchy approximation of one. “This,” he said, holding up his hand for display and jabbing the marker at it, “is where I’ll be keeping count of how many times you say my name. You’ve already used up one, and if you say it more than five, then I’m leaving and I won’t talk to you again for the whole day.” 

“Okay,” Kaworu said with a smile, surprisingly cooperatively. He dropped his arms to his sides. “So what would you like to talk about today? I have a lot of things I want to tell you, but you’d probably get mad at me if I did, so whatever you want to do is good with me.” 

Shinji sat a safe distance from Kaworu’s tub and tucked his knees into a hug, refusing to look Kaworu in the eye, and he eventually dropped his gaze altogether to ensure that he didn’t accidentally end up looking at Sachiel directly in the process. “You’re the one who wanted me to come here; you tell me.” 

“Okay,” Kaworu chirped again. Shinji could hear the soft swishing of the water as Kaworu swiveled from side to side. “In that case, I’ve been meaning to tell you that I figured out what that song you were humming was.” 

“You mean since yesterday?” 

“Yes!” Kaworu reached for the book from Ritsuko. He’d been asking around for any books on music yesterday, but this had been the only product of the search aside from the sheet music itself, and it had more to do with the scientific aspect of music than anything. Still, Kaworu had been grateful, and as Kaji had taught him today, this could still be counted as a small step forward on his grand adventure to impress Ikari. 

“Would you hand me a stick, please, Ikari-kun?” 

Shinji picked up a nearby specimen and tossed it carelessly in Kaworu’s direction. 

“Ah… um… could you please try again, Ikari-kun? You threw it a little bit too far to the side for me to reach.” 

Shinji finally allowed himself to glance in Kaworu’s direction in order to assess the damage: he had, indeed, in his disregard, abandoned the concept of “aim” altogether. His eyes quickly overlooked Kaworu once he’d anchored down his position and followed an invisible line down to Kaworu’s right, where he eventually found the stick lying a bit outside what appeared to be a perimeter of exploded sunflowers. “What are all these from?” 

“That’s a secret, Ikari-kun,” said Kaworu gleefully.

Shinji rolled his eyes and snatched the stick back up to return it. 

“Don’t you want to know what the secret is?” he heard Kaworu ask behind him. 

Shinji turned and threw the stick, more gently this time, at Kaworu’s feet with a firm, “No.” 

“Well, good, because I can’t tell you.” 

“That’s the point of a secret, you dummy.” 

Kaworu began to scratch a row of narrow, rectangular forms into the dirt before him with the stick. As he worked, he said, “Misato told me to tell you that it’s not nice to call people names.” 

“Yeah, but I don’t like you, and Misato isn’t here.” 

Kaworu scribbled wavy lines of dirt in a few of the rectangles on the top row to fill them in. “Misato told me to tell you that she thought you’d say that, and that she will wash your mouth out with soap if you don’t stop, even though she’s not sure that’s an actual thing, but she’ll do it anyway.” 

“Shut up. I thought you said you’d figured out the song.” 

“I did! I need to show you this to explain it, though!” Kaworu scratched in the last few pieces of what turned out to be a drawing of a keyboard. He held up Ritsuko’s music book sideways to show off the diagram he’d been using as a reference, which displayed all 88 piano keys listed with their attributed individual frequencies. 

“See, see, Ikari-kun, I remembered the music you were humming, and I went over each of the notes and I matched them to this page, and then I thought okay, now I know what the notes are, so then…” Kaworu flipped to a different section of the book, which covered musical notation, “So then, after I figured out what the notes were called, I looked in here to find out how they would look written down, and _then_ , and then —” The book’s spine crackled when Kaworu tossed it away in favor of the sheet music compilation, which, in turn, he nearly sent flying when he practically whipped it open by the front cover. “So I had this picture in my head of what the writing was supposed to look like, right? And I was looking and looking through this other book and thinking ‘I really hope the song Ikari-kun was humming was a popular one, otherwise it probably won’t be in here,’ and I went through the whole thing trying to match up the notes in here with the ones in my head, but I couldn’t find it.” 

By now, Kaworu was becoming so engrossed in his own retelling of his investigation that he was hopping back and forth between his feet.

“… Do you have to pee?” Shinji asked, pursing his lips. 

“What? Oh, no, I’m just excited. So then, Ikari-kun, _then_ , I thought… that maybe, you had gotten the exact notes wrong —”

“Did not.”

“No, Ikari-kun, cause I remember exactly which ones you used and they didn’t match the sheet music, and I found out that that’s because you had… like…” Kaworu framed an invisible box with his hands and scooted it over in midair, “… shifted it, cause you kept all the intervals between the notes the same, and that’s why it didn’t sound different to you. And so!” he increased his rate of speech to near babbling before Shinji could protest again, “So, keeping that in mind, I went through the whole book again, just looking for notes that matched the intervals, and I found it, Ikari-kun! And it turns out that the actual note it’s supposed to start on is _this_ ,” Kaworu stabbed the stick into the F# on his makeshift keyboard and produced a perfectly pitched hum in his throat to match it. He continued to point, less violently with each new addition, to a succession of keys to which he gave the proper tones, and the sounds he produced by this method quickly fell into the well-trodden pattern of the “Ode to Joy” melody. 

“And here it is!” he concluded, opening the sheet music with a flourish to the page titled “Ode to Joy: from Symphony No. 9 in D Minor”. 

“So…” he said, gazing at Shinji hopefully, “have I impressed you?” 

Shinji blinked slowly at Kaworu. He didn’t say anything. In the next few moments of silence, Kaworu listened to him breathing in and out, and when he finally spoke, the only thing he said was, “Nagisa… you’ve used my name eight times.” 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who may not know, [angelic-courting-rituals](http://angelic-courting-rituals.tumblr.com/) is the writing blog I opened where I post ficlets, take prompts, and write the prizes for the "feed my insecure need for external validation" game (wherein everyone who comments gets a ficlet of their choice). Go on, play it. Everyone's a winner.  
> But as always, you can come a-kawoshinning with me at [lady-daedalus](http://lady-daedalus.tumblr.com/).


	7. Ladies, Take Care of Your Legs: The Ballad of Suzuhara Touji

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Kaworu and Shinji reach a milestone, and the tale of Touji Suzuhara and Rei Ayanami is told, and then forgotten again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why is this so hard?

Were Shinji of the scientific mind, specifically the kind of scientific mind belonging to old British gentlemen who narrate scientific documentaries in a perpetual haze of pleasant enchantment, he might have watched the speed with which Kaworu collapsed to the ground to replicate his faceup, dead beetle posture from yesterday and thought, “By Jove (or the Japanese equivalent thereof), but these mutant skeletons are sure made of some amazing stuff! What wondrous creatures of infinite majesty!” He had never actually seen one of these documentaries, as documentaries were an extinct species by his time, but Ritsuko had mentioned them every now and again, and their legacy survived in the form of a game Shinji and the others had played when they were five or so. The game had been called “British Gentleman,” wherein the person embodying the eponymous British Gentleman would follow the others around and do their very best to narrate the local goings-on in an interesting way. Kensuke had been the best at this game; Ritsuko had been very impressed with his efforts. 

Were Shinji of a different scientific mind, the kind that suited people who leaned more toward Ritsuko’s mentality, he might have thought, at the sight of Kaworu trying to the best of his ability to roll around pathetically in the dirt with his legs still in the tub and bones annoyingly in tact, “Huh, look at that. Wonder what that stuff’s all made up of.” However, since he wasn’t remotely on the spectrum of the scientific mind, the only thing that he said to himself was, “Darn.” 

“Ikari-kun,” Kaworu cried, and between his white hair and the way he clutched at his chest, he almost resembled a miniature version of one of Kaji’s patients having a heart attack. He was certainly putting forth an effort to make it seem that way. “Nooooo, no, no, no, Ikari-kun, Ikari-kun, I promise I won’t use your name again, I swear; please don’t go, I can’t stand being crushed for a whole ‘nother day, Ikari-kun, and I’ve behaved this morning and I haven’t even mentioned _once_ how much I love you like you told me to yesterday, Ikari-kun, how could you _do_ this to me, does love mean _nothing_ to you?” 

“Does me telling you not to do something mean nothing to _you_?” Shinji shouted over him. “You’re using my name right now; obviously I can’t trust you with anything.” He was readying himself to sprint back home, but then he caught sight of Sachiel. 

Sachiel’s expression still remained the same as any of them had seen it, but Shinji had never been quite so aware of it until now. _My, what big eyes you have, Sachiel. Are those technically eyes? Whatever they are, they are big._ He stopped moving, and after a few seconds, he realized he’d stopped breathing, too. _My, what big teeth you have, Sachiel. I know they’re there, even though they’re not visible now. Please keep them that way._ There was a mysterious gravity that kept pulling his eyes down to the empty space concealing Sachiel’s mouth, and eventually Shinji just stopped fighting it. His gaze then slid down to the dimly glowing core nestled beneath Sachiel’s false ribs. _My, what a big heart you have,Sachiel. Such a big, big heart. You seem like you must be the generous type. Please don’t eat me._

Kaworu’s breathless entreaties quickly devolved into messy, wordless crying. _Ah, such a heartfelt courting song!_ British Gentleman would have most certainly said, and then his eyes would have followed Shinji’s to contemplate Sachiel’s current non-mouth. 

British Gentleman would have, upon being thrown unceremoniously into Sachiel’s gaping maw, had a look about the place, said, _And here, we can see a remarkable view of the interior of the oral cavity, truly extraordinary; observe the multiple rows of teeth growing out of the hard palate…_ , and then disappeared down the esophagus with nary a complaint. British Gentleman would have been positively delighted (one might even say “chuffed”) at the opportunity to further explore the treasure trove of biological impossibilities that the eldritch digestive system had to offer the industrious adventurer. 

Shinji had never been very good at playing British Gentleman. 

“Okay, Nagisa, oh my god, I won’t leave, just stop screaming,” he said, plugging his fingers firmly into his ears, a gesture in which he’d partaken mostly so that he could show off how very affronted he was by Nagisa’s behavior, because Kaworu could temporarily take his ambulatory freedom, but he wouldn’t have his dignity, damn it. Kaworu stopped wailing, but he continued to sniffle loudly, arms sprawled out in the dirt and fingers clutching compulsively at the nearest bunches of grass. 

“Stop being dramatic.” 

Kaworu just sniffed some more and gazed up at Shinji with his roundest-eyed expression. “Then what do you want me to do?” 

“I dunno, talk about yourself. You like to do that, right? Um, list all your siblings again or something.”

“But I want to hear about _you_ ,” said Kaworu as he scooted himself a bit further out of the basin to be closer Shinji. Shinji’s reflexive recoil set Kaworu’s bottom lip quivering violently again, so Shinji forced himself to stay still by tensing up his spine and keeping one eye on Sachiel at all times. 

“What do you want to know about me?” 

“Lots of things. Everything.” 

“Be more specific than that.” 

“Um,” Kaworu began, which he followed with a soft hiccup. The ring finger of his left hand began drawing little musical notes in the dirt, untethered from staff lines, while he stared up at the sky. “You can tell me what you like about music. Um… like… what’s your favorite interval? I think mine’s either the fourth or the sixth.” His hand stopped tracing patterns in favor of stretching the fingers to accommodate an imaginary keyboard. “Well, I think I like all the even intervals, but the fourth and the sixth are definitely my two favorites. What about you?” He looked to Shinji eagerly, as if expecting to be told a magnificent secret indeed. 

Shinji sucked the inside of his bottom lip before he said sourly, “I… don’t know what those are.” 

Kaworu was baffled. “But,” he said, “But then… what do you get from it, if you listen to it so much?” 

Shinji shrugged, a full shrug, too, palms up and everything. “It’s catchy? It’s something to do? What do you want me to tell you, Nagisa?” 

“ _Kaworu_ ,” said Kaworu.

“Anyway, I don’t like talking about myself.” 

“ _Kaworu_ ,” Kaworu pressed again with impassioned stubbornness. “I want you to be able to call me _Kaworu_.” 

Shinji kicked a small pile of dirt away that he’d dug up grinding his shoe into the dirt. “Kaworu,” he mumbled, and he added a hasty disclaimer of “And that doesn’t mean you get to use my name all of a sudden!” when he saw Kaworu’s eyes fill up with awe as he simultaneously appeared to inflate with happiness. 

Upon receiving this command, Kaworu quickly clapped one hand over his mouth while the other gave Shinji a sideways thumbs-up that said, “this is the first time I’ve ever given a thumbs up.” 

“I wish I knew what all the different instruments sounded like,” he said when he’d decided he was calm enough to take his hand away. “Cause I know what all the frequencies are - it would have never occurred to me to harmonize them like that, though; the Lilin are really clever! Anyway, I know what the sounds are, like…” he stopped to emit another F# from his throat, “but I don’t really get… what did the book call it?… _timbre_. How does that work?” 

Shinji focused on a small pebble he was trying to unearth with his fingernail. “I don’t know either,” he said quietly. “I don’t know anything about the technical stuff.” 

“But you must know how the different instruments sound,” Kaworu said. “I really, really need to know. It’s been bothering me ever since I read it.” 

“I’ve never really thought about it.” 

“Yeah, because you get to hear it, so you don’t need a word for it.”

The scraping of Shinji’s fingernail against the pebble filled the brief moment of silence before Shinji said coldly, “Okay, but what do you want me to do about that?” 

“Well,” began Kaworu, and the bashful tone in his voice made Shinji regret asking. “You could let me listen to your tape player…” 

“No.” 

“Please?” 

“No.”

“Pretty please?”

“No.”

“Why not?” 

Shinji yanked the pebble out of the ground in frustration, then, upon realizing that he needed a new “aggressively ignoring Kaworu” project, set to work rounding out the small divot he’d created. “Because it’s mine and I don’t want you to break it. And I don’t even really let my friends listen to it, anyway, so it’s got nothing to do with you.” 

He relaxed a bit when this answer appeared to placate Kaworu, although he had no way of knowing that this was only because Kaworu was methodically sorting “get Ikari-kun to let me listen to his music” into the blanks of his “Get Ikari-kun to Love Me” agenda. The reason he had not yet performed his customary conversational rebound was that he was puzzling out if “get Ikari-kun to let me listen to his music” came before or after “become Ikari-kun’s boyfriend”. It definitely came after “obtain permission to use Ikari-kun’s first name,” since lots of people did that already, and Shinji still hoarded his tapes away from them. But then again, Kaworu reconsidered, he’d never seen Asuka listening to his music, and she’d been married to him. Clearly, further research on the matter was required before making an executive decision.

“What do you look so excited about?” Shinji asked.

“I was just thinking… are you saying that if you liked me enough to let me listen to your tapes, you’d like me enough to marry me too?” Kaworu rolled onto his stomach, then rolled back over when he discovered his kneecaps were much harder to hook over the lip of the basin than the backs of his knees. He looked up at Shinji, who was still only watching him out of his peripheral vision, and then he began to walk his fingers over to Shinji’s idle hand. He gently nudged its side with his index finger.

“You’re still on that?” 

“Yeah.” Kaworu nudged Shinji’s hand a bit more hopefully, this time with the backs of his fingertips. Shinji was trying to come up with a response to Kaworu’s question that would keep Kaworu out of hysterics and himself out of Sachiel’s molars, and Kaworu took this opportunity to try to push his fingers between Shinji’s.

“Stop,” Shinji said, snatching his hand away and scooting out of Kaworu’s reach.

Kaworu crawled back into his tub, but instead of retreating underwater to sulk like Shinji had been hoping, he stood, lifted his left leg out with a splash, and plopped it down defiantly on the ground. He followed it up with the right, then sank down, clinging to the side of the tub with one arm still on the inside. Then, he stuck his leg out to impishly poke Shinji with his toe. 

“Quit it,” Shinji said, right before Kaworu’s big toe jabbed him in the stomach. “Ugh, I mean it; stop,” he added in disgust when Kaworu began wiggling his toes independently at him with a mischievous expression on his face.

“What, this?” Kaworu wiggled each individual toe again, starting from the left and moving to the right. 

“Yes,” said Shinji, taking a swat at Kaworu’s foot.

Undeterred, Kaworu scrabbled a bit to keep upright against the plastic bin as he stretched himself out to reach further. “Why, does it impress you?” he asked cheekily.

“No. It’s gross.” 

“I’ll stop if you tell me how to impress you,” Kaworu said before he sank down even further, so that only his hand remained underwater up to his wrist.

“No,” said Shinji, leaning back.

“Please?” Now only the top half of Kaworu’s hand was in the water.

“No.” 

“Pretty please?” Kaworu’s voice was strained, as was the rest of him, while he managed to poke Shinji in the side. 

“No.” 

Kaworu had whatever the next mutation of “please” was already prepared, but it was quickly extinguished in the deluge that came rushing out of his tub all at once when it tipped over. 

In the same time it had taken for Shinji to leap back from the splash and for Kaworu to give a gurgled “ow” as the empty basin landed on him, Sachiel had already slithered its torso forward on its arms to where they sat, and Shinji found himself staring down the bumpy length of its tongue rather sooner than he had expected. He didn’t even have time to get a proper fight-or-flight response mounted before he realized it wasn’t a threat, and by that time, Sachiel had already plucked Kaworu from the ground by his shirt, popped him into its mouth, and turned around to scuttle down the cliff on all fours before Shinji even registered the breeze from its movement. 

Shinji let himself breathe again when he heard the splash that meant Sachiel had reached the water with its cargo, and he moved to right the basin again out of guilt. What if by accidentally luring Kaworu out of the water, he had broken some rule and now Kaworu had to stay in the sea for the rest of the day? Asuka and the others wouldn’t be pleased at having one of their three allotted days to spend with Kaworu so crudely hewn out of their schedule. What if it was even worse than that? What if he’d broken a _cardinal_ rule? Did something bad happen to Kaworu if he left the water completely? Once, when he and some of the other children had been telling campfire stories, Asuka had won the unspoken contest for the most gruesome story when she related the unnervingly detailed account of a vampire who started bleeding violently because he’d been tricked by an awfully Asuka-like heroine into entering a house without an explicit invitation. The word “orifices” had been invoked, several times, to great effect on their six to ten year old audience (he could clearly remember seeing Touji and Kensuke by the light of the fire, mouthing the word “orifices” to themselves in macabre fascination). Was something similar at work here?

Shinji nervously spread out the puddle from Kaworu’s spill with his shoe, as if trying to dispose of evidence. _Fourteen siblings_ , he chanted to himself while he scraped his sole against the ground. _Fourteen siblings. Fourteen siblings. That’s thirteen more things that want to eat me now. They’ll have to cut me up into fourteen pieces, and then they’ll still be so disgusted with me, they’ll take it out on Misato and vomit me up on the ground right before she steps outside so she walks through it. Or they’ll regurgitate me into pellets. And then Ritsuko will collect the pellets and have everyone dissect them for a fun science experiment to see how many of my bones they can retrieve, and then they’ll take all the bones and try to reassemble them, and then my incomplete skeleton will hang in a corner somewhere as a warning not to mess with things we don’t understand, except for the days when Ritsuko pulls it out to use as an anatomical model to teach first aid_.

He had already resigned himself to his fate, dragging his feet listlessly against the now feathered edges of the puddle, when Sachiel’s face reemerged into view over the edge of the cliff. Its front half crawled casually to where Shinji was standing sheepishly in the wet dirt ( _the scene of the murder!_ his brain supplied unhelpfully), where it positioned its mouth above the basin to allow Kaworu to fall back in along with a rush of water, punctuated by a small _ptooey_ when Sachiel expelled the remainder. 

“Um,” Shinji said softly, leaning over to make sure Kaworu wasn’t floating belly up, and when Kaworu surfaced, wringing water out of his hair, he said, “are you okay, Kaworu?” 

Kaworu stiffened for a moment, his hands freezing mid-wring, and Shinji counted two audible drips that fell into the basin before Kaworu exclaimed, “Yes! Thank you for asking!” and threw himself forward to seize Shinji’s hand. “You used my first name,” he said, quieter this time, and he pulled up his shirt collar to hide his grin. 

“You’re welcome,” Shinji said mechanically, trying not to think about how Kaworu’s bathwater probably had a film of sea monster backwash on it now. 

“Wait!” Kaworu said, suddenly pulling his fingers away before they got too comfortable, although they still hovered over Shinji’s, shaking a bit from excitement. “Is it… is it okay with you if I hold your hand?” 

“… Yeah, I guess.” 

He let his fingers settle themselves back in just as quickly, and he added quiet giggling to the activities he was doing behind his shirt. “You’re being really nice to me all of a sudden.” 

Shinji avoided his eyes, albeit this time in self-reproach. “I feel bad cause I made you fall out of your tub. I’m really sorry.” 

“Why?” 

“Because it almost killed you, probably.” 

“Um… no, not really. I mean, I know it’s bad if I stay out of the water, but Sachiel wouldn’t let that happen. Here, you wanna see me do it again? I’ll prove it,” Kaworu said, getting ready to hoist one of his legs up over the edge. 

“Oh — no, I don’t need to see it again,” Shinji said, with a little less gravity now that he had been assured complete acquittal. 

The tension almost immediately transferred to Kaworu, however, whose blissful mood clouded over, and he said, in a suitably dampened voice, “Then, does that mean you’re only being nice to me because you felt guilty?” 

“Uh…” 

“Ikari-kun,” Kaworu said flatly, “I don’t want you to be nice to me as a punishment; I want you to be nice to me because you like me.” 

“Sorry.” 

“Well, it’s fine for today, I guess.” Kaworu furrowed his brow and swung their hands in a small pendulum movement, like he was trying to gauge their weight. “Since I really like holding your hand, and I don’t want to have to stop. But starting tomorrow, don’t let me do it unless you’re letting me because you like me, okay?” 

“Okay.” 

“No matter _how much_ I ask,” Kaworu said virtuously.

“Why don’t you just not ask, then?” 

“Because if I don’t ask, then how will I know?” 

“Wait for me to tell you, duh.” 

“Ohhh,” Kaworu said. His eyes drifted up while he chewed on this new food for thought. “Ohhhh,” he said again, once he’d thoroughly chewed, swallowed, and digested. “Okay, then.” The cheer began to seep back into his expression. “I will just have to make that another goal for myself then, Ikari-kun,” he concluded with a smile. 

“What?” 

“Nothing,” he said, although his fruitless attempt to hide his glee by chewing on his cheek made it very clear that he wanted Shinji to follow up on that question. When Shinji didn’t, he threw in a whispered, “It’s a secret,” to sweeten the deal. 

“Oh, right,” Shinji said, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “The secret.” 

“I’ll tell you what it is if you _really_ want to know.” 

“No thank you,” Shinji said distractedly as his eyes wandered over to Sachiel, who was crawling its torso back to sit on the other side of the fence. 

Kaworu twisted his neck to see what the fuss was about. “How many times do I have to tell you, Sachiel’s not gonna eat you.” 

“I know that.” 

“Then how come you keep looking at him all weird?” 

“I am not,” said Shinji, managing to finally pull his attention back to Kaworu to prove his point.

“Are too. I know because everyone else keeps telling me not to let him eat people, too, only Lilin probably don’t taste like fish, so I bet Sachiel wouldn’t want to eat you, anyway.” Then Kaworu leaned in close to whisper, “Wait, do you taste like fish, though?” 

“No!” 

“You don’t have to look all offended; I was just asking. Here, you can ask me questions now, if that makes you feel better.” 

Shinji had, despite his best efforts, actually let his curiosity go and get all piqued without his supervision, so he gave a begrudging, “Fine.” He pretended to think of a question so as not to seem too interested, then asked, “How come you keep calling humans ‘Lilin?’ ” 

“Why do you keep calling me and my siblings ‘mutants?’ ” Kaworu responded quickly, though he did so without confrontation in his tone. “Because I asked what it means, and I’m pretty sure that’s not what we are.” 

“Well, if you’re not mutants, then what _are_ you? Also, you didn’t answer my question.” 

“I’m getting to it,” Kaworu insisted. “And the answer is I don’t know to both of them, ‘cause I only call you what I hear my siblings call you, but my siblings don’t have a special term for all of us. Ask me a different question that I can answer.” 

“Okay…” Shinji said. “Then, did everyone else really tell you not to let Sachiel eat them? Like, in those actual words?” 

Kaworu fidgeted. “Okay, so actually, it was just Misato. But I mean, everyone else always looks scared of him.” 

“Wait, what did Misato tell you?” 

“It was really weird,” said Kaworu. “She told me not to let him eat Ritsuko, even if Ritsuko tried to get him to. Only why would she do that? So I couldn’t tell if it was a joke or not.” 

“Oh,” said Shinji. He looked around for signs of anyone else approaching, instinctively holding his breath to listen for the rustling cadence specific to footsteps. He didn’t catch any sign of someone coming up the path, and on the other side there was only Sachiel, but he wasn’t sure if Sachiel still counted as an eavesdropper or not, so he motioned for Kaworu to lean in and lowered his voice all the same. 

“It’s probably not something you’re supposed to tell other people,” he said, “and especially don’t tell Asuka, ‘cause she gets really mad if people talk about it. But I think it’s because sometimes Ritsuko doesn’t like us.” 

“Why not?” Kaworu asked, trying to mimic Shinji’s whisper.

“Well, it seems like she likes us most of the time, but sometimes she’ll have these days when she’s teaching us something, and then all of a sudden she just gets, like… really quiet for a long time and stares into space looking sad. I asked Kaji about it once, and he says he thinks it’s ‘cause she probably gets frustrated sometimes not being around people who’re as smart as her. So I think maybe Misato meant that Ritsuko might try to get Sachiel to eat her just so she could have something else to study? But that’s kind of a stupid way to do it, because wouldn’t she just get digested? So, I guess… I don’t know either, since Ritsuko’s too smart for that.” 

Kaworu paused. “Is she smart? I couldn’t tell.” 

“Well, she is,” Shinji retorted defensively. “Like, this one time, Touji got this _huge_ cut on his leg —” Shinji stopped to trace a line along the length of his thigh for illustration, “— and Ritsuko was the only one out of all of us who knew how to give stitches, and Kensuke said if she hadn’t been there, they’d’ve had to just cut the whole thing off.” He made a dramatic whacking motion with an invisible axe held in his free hand. 

Kaworu regarded the spot on Shinji’s leg where the axe would have landed. “Why’s that?” 

“Because he would’ve lost too much blood and the blood he had left would’ve gotten all infected and gross.” 

This explanation did not assuage Kaworu’s confusion. “But why’s _that_?” 

“Because of germs.” 

“You Lilin sure worry about germs a lot.” Suddenly, Kaworu remembered something he’d overheard Ritsuko saying to Hikari when a spider ran over the top of her foot. “And anyway, you’re a lot bigger than them, so they’re probably more afraid of you than you are of them.” 

“That’s not how it works; they’d still be inside Touji’s leg and make it fall off.” 

“Well, okay, but it’d grow back.” 

“No. It wouldn’t.” 

“Yes. It would,” Kaworu said, equally assuredly. “I’ve _done_ it.” 

Shinji looked revolted. “Yeah, well, humans can’t do it.” 

“Have you tried?” Kaworu demanded. 

“Um, no, but —”

“Then I don’t believe you.” Kaworu began to cross his arms resolutely, then stopped when he remembered that he’d have to let go of Shinji’s hand to do so. 

“Then you can ask Touji yourself when everyone else comes here; he’d love to tell you all about it.” 

“Fine then, I will.” 

“Fine.” 

 

“Yep! It’s right here,” said Touji, rolling up the leg of his shorts so he could show off his shiny trophy of a scar. The small gaggle of other children who had gotten up early enough to join them all rolled their eyes with varying levels of discretion and immediately dispersed to converse among themselves until the story was over. A few of them made a game of seeing how many lines they could recite along with him. 

Kensuke let Touji revel in Kaworu’s _ooh_ ing a few seconds more before he felt the need to say, “Yeah, but according to Ritsuko it wasn’t nearly as bad as it looked; it only _looked_ bad cause of all the blood.” 

“Shut up.” 

“Does it hurt when I do this?” Kaworu asked, giving the scar a good prod.

“Nah.” 

“That’s not what you were saying when it happened,” Kensuke said. 

“Shut _up_.” 

“And you _really_ couldn’t make it grow back? Not even if you tried?” Kaworu repeated. 

“Uh… no.” 

“Then Ikari-kun really wasn’t lying,” Kaworu murmured to himself. “Hey, how did you get it?” 

Touji began to roll his shorts back down. “Shinji didn’t tell you?” 

Kaworu looked wistfully in Shinji’s direction. As soon as he’d seen the small crowd coming up the path, he’d dropped Kaworu’s hand and stalked off into one of the longer patches of grass, where he hastily began to pretend he’d been very busy peeling the blades apart this entire time. “No. He told me to ask you because you like to tell it.” 

“He’s not wrong about that,” said Kensuke as Touji smiled broadly behind his surgical mask and jumped into his oft-recited tale with a bold “ _Well_ then.” 

“ _Well_ then,” he said, “you know who Ayanami is, right?” 

“Yes,” Kaworu replied. “I met her earlier this morning.” 

“Yeah, and she’s super weird, right?” 

Kaworu shrugged. “I guess.” 

“So this one day, I was walking around _right up here_ because I was looking for bugs to catch, and then suddenly I look up and I see Ayanami right there up against the fence.” He pointed covertly in Sachiel’s direction so as to avoid seeming rude. “Like, right there. But then, I get closer to ask what she’s doing, and it turns out she’s on the other side, just sitting there. And I guess it’s not impossible to do, since Asuka’s climbing on the fence all the time, but Asuka’s never actually gone over. So there I am, and I’m trying to decide what to do, and I call her name, and then without even looking at me she just _falls off_.

“And I ran up to the fence, but it was too steep to see clearly where she was, so I ran down all the way to the beach part, and I start climbing on the rocks there to see if I can find her, but I couldn’t. And there was this one section where I usually jump to the other rocks, since they’re pretty flat and close to each other, only this time I didn’t check to see if they were slippery from the water, so I fell and cut my leg on one of them.”

Touji mimed a spurt of blood shooting out of his leg. “It was _really_ gross,” he said, although he sounded very pleased about it. “And I was too far down for anyone to hear me, so after a while I just had to kind of… hop back up the steps until someone else saw me. I got blood all over the steps, too. Everyone went to see it afterward.” 

“His mom was so pissed at him,” said Kensuke. 

“Yeah,” Touji said. “But she didn’t have time to yell at me til after Ritsuko gave me the stitches. That was probably the part that hurt the most, plus she kept having to pour stuff that stung on it to keep it clean. Although, she did give me these pain meds over the next couple days, so it wasn’t as bad.” 

“Apparently,” Kensuke added, “they were something she’d been saving for a ‘mergency, and they’re supposed to be really expensive for trading.” 

“And then I kept telling them that they had to go look for Ayanami, and a bunch of people went to search near the bottom of the cliff, but no one else could find her either, and then there was this really big panic because everyone thought she drowned. And the _creepiest_ part of this story, is that the very next day, she just showed up back here walking around the apartment building, and people kept asking her what she was doing and how she got back, and she told them that she had no idea what they were talking about.” 

Kensuke smirked. “I still say that Touji must’ve picked and eaten some weird plant, and he just doesn’t remember it.” Then, he stopped himself to admit, “Ayanami is _really_ weird, though. I think she might have some kind of short term memory loss thing, cause every time I try to talk to her, she looks like she has no idea what’s going on. And if you try to say, like, ‘Hey, Ayanami, do you remember that time you did… whatever,’ she’s all like,” here he affected a quiet monotone, “ ‘Oh, is that a thing I do?’ Also, she disappears for a really long time a lot, and no one knows where she goes.”

Kaworu had read before that the Lilin often scratched their heads to express confusion, and he did so. “Then who does she stay with?” 

“She just kind of bounces around a lot; I don’t think she really has a permanent guardian, because somehow everyone ended up taking turns letting her stay with them for a few days. ‘Cause like I said, she’ll just wander off sometimes for days, and it really used to stress the adults out, but the thing is, she always turns up here sooner or later. So I guess they decided they had enough other stuff to worry about. I dunno; the whole thing is really, really freaky if you think about it.” 

“Huh,” said Kaworu. 

“Yeah,” said Touji. 

“That was a very interesting story,” said Kaworu, accepting a water bottle from one of the other children as they began to trickle back into the immediate vicinity. “It was informative; thank you for sharing.” 

“It was nothing,” Touji said heartily, though everyone could tell he clearly thought it was a very big something.

“But you should tell us some more about you,” Kensuke was quick to interject. 

And so the story of Rei Ayanami quickly slipped back into the collective unconscious for another day as Kaworu threw a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure Shinji still wasn’t paying attention, then beckoned each of the other children over to whisper his new secret to them. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, you can come a-kawoshinning with me at [angelic-courting-rituals](http://angelic-courting-rituals.tumblr.com/), for fat-free fluff, or [lady-daedalus](http://lady-daedalus.tumblr.com/), for nothing of particular merit.


	8. The Post-Apocalyptic Primer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Kaworu takes up the art of language, and Asuka takes up the practice of amateur dentistry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WHY IS THIS SO HARD
> 
> On a much lighter note, please to be enjoying the [latest](http://angelic-courting-rituals.tumblr.com/post/148276514383/lady-daedalus-seamcrookedsam-some-stuff-that) [additions](http://angelic-courting-rituals.tumblr.com/post/146727886713/mermaidsnogrr-angelic-courting-rituals-wrote-a) to my treasured fanart gallery, generously donated by @seamcrookedsam and @mermaidsnogrr, respectively, on tumblr.

The visual cover of both the darkness and Sachiel’s watchful non-eyes in conjnction with the auditory cover of the cicadas formed Kaworu’s first line of defense. His second line of defense was his held breath, which he maintained while he lurked underwater not because it was necessary for survival, but because it sharpened his hearing. When he finally got impatient of sitting with his spine tensed, he allowed one of his hands to creep out of his basin and down the warm plastic until they reached the ground, where he extended his fingers one at a time like insect feelers. After a few seconds of furtive searching, they found their target and seized it for Kaworu to pull back into his small lair. 

Back under the water, Kaworu hugged the sunflower to his chest and held his breath again. Neither Sachiel nor his senses alerted him to any observers, but he still allowed the top of his head to break the surface so he could make a quick scan of the area, just to be safe. Then, vertebra by vertebra, he relaxed back into the water to begin his work. Back in commission now, his fingers sought out their first specimen for excision. The nails dug in as close to the receptacle as they could manage before plucking the topmost petal out of its spot. 

“He loves me,” Kaworu thought to himself as he released it to drift idly back to the surface.

“He loves me not.” Another petal floated upward to join it. 

Several minutes later, Kaworu emerged from his atelier and looked sadly at the darkness-dulled yellow blanket bobbing around him. He dropped the last piece onto it directly. “He loves me not.”

 

_Ritsuko looked out over the group of children and the small tumbleweeds they appeared to be forming with their twine. Hikari was lying on her back because she claimed she could think better that way, Shinji kept sticking his tongue out at different angles after Asuka had told him it helped with concentration, and Touji was jostling with a small group of boys for ownership of one of the two pairs of safety scissors._

_“Tell them that they can’t hog the scissors,” Kensuke ordered as he continued to jab his finger in their direction like he was trying to curse them._

_“You can’t hog the scissors,” Ritsuko repeated in monotone to very little effect. She continued to twirl the whipping knot she’d made as an example between her thumb and index finger, looking up occasionally to make sure no one had acquired any wounds since her last check-in._

_“No fair. Tell_ him _that he has to wait his turn and I can’t control if these scissors suck,” one of the offending party members said._

_“_ Give it _,” she heard Touji shout shortly before Asuka, on the other side of the room, threw her piece of rope onto the floor and yelled, “Done!” She held her hands above her head and looked to Ritsuko for approval, like she was in a competition and waiting for the judge to acknowledge that she hadn’t tampered with her project after the time limit expired._

_“See, Ritsuko? I finished first,” she said when Ritsuko was too slow to respond for her liking._

_“Yeah,” was all Ritsuko could muster. A few more seconds passed, then she managed to scrape together a weak smile and a “Good work, Asuka.”_

_“See how good it looks? It’s cause I remembered all the instructions without even having to ask.”_

_“Mm-hm.” Ritsuko’s attention drifted wearily back to Touji, who had foregone the scissors squabble and had instead begun gnawing at the ends of his knot with his teeth. Then he began to cycle between pulling the twine through his gritted teeth in a weird reverse floss and picking the stringy bits that frayed off and collected there out of his mouth._

_Ritsuko tugged at a hangnail on her thumb._

_“Stop copying me,” Hikari whined, rolling over to shield her rope under her stomach from her prying neighbor._

_Ritsuko pulled the hangnail down too far and pressed her other thumb below the small tear to numb it. The skin above her knuckle turned white while the blood drained out into the crease of her cuticle. She wiped it away._

_“Asuka, I don’t think it’s working, plus my tongue keeps drying out.”_

_“That’s cause you’re not doing it right, Stupid Shinji.”_

_“Well then you show me how to do it if you’re so smart.”_

_“Nuh-uh, cause otherwise you won’t learn.”_

_“I think you’re lying.”_

_“Yeah, well I think you’re just jealous of me.”_

_Ritsuko watched, cross-eyed, as her glasses crept down her nose from the sweat. She tried not to itch the sunburn on her leg by focusing instead on the one she was probably acquiring right now on her forearm._

_She put the back of her hand against it as if she were taking its temperature and imagined the children all getting fevers. She pushed her glasses back up and blinked rapidly to uncross her eyes._

_“Ritsuko,” Asuka called again. “Ritsukoooo.”_

_Touji finally managed to rip off the end of his twine with his teeth while Kensuke applauded. “Do mine next,” he said._

_“Right,” said Ritsuko, abruptly standing up pocketing her example knot. “It looks like you’re all doing fine; I’ll just leave you to it for a while then. Remember to help others out if you get done before them, it’s not a contest, et cetera.”_

_There was a scattered, eye contact-less response of “Kay”s from everyone._

_“Good talk,” Ritsuko said under her breath before she leaned against the wall of the building and turned the corner, dragging her side against it the whole way._

_Her irking sense of responsibility kept her from traveling too far away; she only made it about halfway down the wall before she sat down in the grass, where the most strenuous thing she had to think about was shooing away the occasional insect. She began scraping the dried blood off her fingernail while she simultaneously tried to scrape away the resentment that continuously accumulated on top of her memories of better times. Purging such debris was an at least twice-daily ritual for her, and one which was especially hard to continue if interrupted, so when she heard the rustling of a small person making their way toward her, she removed her glasses so that she wouldn’t have to see them._

_“Ritsuko?” Asuka said._

_Ritsuko didn’t say anything. A fly landed on her shoulder and Asuka swatted it away for her._

_“Ritsuko?” Asuka repeated, tapping her on the shoulder. She continued to tap on her shoulder every few seconds until Ritsuko finally said, “Yes?”_

_“Are you mad at me?”_

_“No.”_

_Ritsuko knew that, much like the way she had honed her barometer for detecting the beginnings of Asuka’s tantrums, Asuka had sniffed out the trail that had brought her to her current hiding place, and this first exchange was a signal more than anything, a start codon signaling the beginning of a well-trodden conversation._

_“I’m sorry,” said Asuka._

_“You didn’t do anything wrong.”_

_“I mean, I’m sorry about everyone else.”_

_Ritsuko laughed._

_“But it’s also kind of a good thing, too. Because even though they’re all average, that means you and me are smarter than any of them, so you shouldn’t be sad about that. Like, you could have ended up with any of them, but you ended up with me instead. Like, you could have gotten Shinji. He’s probably still sitting there with his tongue out because I told him to. And I get it when you tell me things, and even when you don’t want to explain something to me you don’t have to, because you can just tell me to read about it myself and I’ll get it. So it’s not all bad. Ask me what twelve times twelve is.”_

_“What’s twelve times twelve?” Ritsuko recited like she was setting up for a punchline._

_“One hundred and forty-four,” Asuka said proudly, with crisp enunciation. “And I know all the other times tables, too; everyone else only knows that a number times one is the number. So… so don’t get sad over them, okay? Because none of them matter in the long run.”_

_“Oh, that’s kind of a mean thing to say.”_

_“But it’s true! It’s not like anyone’s gonna remember them or anything, but everyone knows that_ you’re _smart, and I know that you get sad because you don’t get to be as smart as you actually are, but we’re not gonna stay here forever, and when we move, you and me will just go off and find people working on more important things.”_

_“Well…”_

_“Hey,” Asuka said, and she resumed tapping on Ritsuko’s shoulder, this time with a slightly more frenetic rhythm. “We aren’t gonna stay here forever, are we?”_

_“Stop that,” Ritsuko said firmly, putting a hand over her shoulder._

_“_ Are _we?”_

_Ritsuko was silent._

_“_ Well _?”_

_Ritsuko pushed herself to her feet. “It’s probably about time we get back and make sure no one’s gotten stabbed with the scissors.”_

_She returned her glasses to their rightful place on her nose when she stood up, so she could clearly see Asuka’s livid expression before she turned away._

 

“Oh, you know how I said that Sahaquiel wasn’t a fighter?” Kaworu, said to Kensuke and Touji over the sloshing noises of the water bottle he was shaking up and down (he thought this made the purifying process go faster). He pointed to the notebook Kensuke held that contained his ongoing graphic novel. “I was thinking… you know who _would_ be good at fighting? Ramiel. Or Israfel.” 

Kensuke flipped to the page with the illustrated catalog of Kaworu’s siblings that he’d provided last month. “Really?” he asked, squinting at the picture of Ramiel. 

“Yeah.” Kaworu paused to inspect the color of the water bottle’s contents before he resumed his job as the most interesting bartender preparing the least interesting drink. “Ramiel’s really scary when she wants to be.” 

“That’s a she?” Touji said incredulously, leaning in to squint at the picture as well. 

“I mean, not really, but it’s easier to say that way. Anyway, I think instead of making them fight each other, you should have, like, an even _bigger_ enemy so that they can all team up and fight it together.” 

“What powers does Ramiel have?” Kensuke asked, turning to the back section of his notebook where he kept ideas for the plot. 

“Um, she can, like… it’s kind of hard to explain, but she can shoot these, um…” Kaworu mimed shooting an invisible target with a finger gun like he’d seen Touji do several times when they were explaining the plot to him once. “Light beams? I guess?” 

“Wait, like lasers?” 

“Is that what they’re called?” 

Their amateur writers’ meeting was cut short, however, by Asuka coming up the trail, sucking on the small towel she’d been using the collect dew from the grass earlier that morning. “Well don’t you look chipper today,” she said to Kaworu.

“What’s chipper?” 

“Super cheery.”

“Oh, I am,” said Kaworu. “I got to hold Ikari-kun’s hand a lot yesterday.” Then he stilled and looked glumly down at the water bottle in his hands. “He still doesn’t love me, though. But! That was just yesterday, so maybe he’ll love me today.”

“You keep telling that to yourself,” said Asuka.

“I will!” Kaworu chirped, and he once again threw his watery subject back into convulsions.

“So what were you guys talking about?” 

“Stuff you wouldn’t like,” Touji said. 

“Is it your comic?” 

“ _Graphic novel_ ,” Kensuke corrected. 

“Whatever.” 

Kensuke glared at her. “Misato says if you keep doing that with your towels you’ll keep getting canker sores.” 

Asuka, whose innate drive to plan for the future was about as well developed as any other six year old’s, just shrugged and changed the subject. “Hey Kaworu, how come you don’t just stay near where we live overnight instead of making us carry you back and forth?” 

Kaworu switched water bottles while he prepared his answer. “Cause Sachiel doesn’t want me to stay too far away. Cause, like, if something did happen to me, he’d be able to tell but he’d have to come over to get me, and then he’d probably break everything and you wouldn’t have any stuff anymore. So yeah.” 

Asuka wrung the last few drops out of her towel into her mouth. When she’d finished, she said, “Oh. I guess that’s a good reason, then.” 

“Yeah,” Kaworu repeated. “But I’ll probably have to stay up here today anyway, since it’s my last day for the month and Sachiel doesn’t want to take any chances.” 

“Oh, right.” 

“Soooo,” Kensuke said, “since it’s your last day, we should probably do something special.” 

“Probably,” said Kaworu in between intervals of bottle-shaking. 

“What do you want to do?” 

“I dunno,” said Kaworu, “What do _you_ wanna do?” 

“I dunno,” said Kensuke. He looked at Touji. “What do _you_ wanna do?” 

“This is stupid,” said Asuka.

“Oh yeah?” said Touji. “You come up with something, then.” 

“Fine.” Asuka crouched down and leaned her elbows on the edge of Kaworu’s tub. “You ever burned anything before?” 

Kaworu shifted about as he tried to determine whether or not this was a trick question. “… No?” 

“Are you asking me or telling me?” Asuka asked, accessing her bank of phrases from the belligerent neighbors.

“I’m… telling you?” He looked to Sachiel for assistance. “Yes,” he said after a short pause. “I’m definitely telling you.” 

“So, bonfire, then.” Asuka thumped her palm on Kaworu’s shoulder like she saw men do when they reached an agreement. 

“Well, okay, but that’s for when it gets dark. So then what does he do for the _rest_ of the day?” Kensuke said. “Did you think about that?” 

“No, cause I’m not doing all your work for you,” Asuka said. 

Kaworu took a break and napped while they argued.

 

He woke up to see Sachiel straining to lean over the fence without collapsing it, mouth open to such an extent that Kaworu assumed it must be nearly dragging on the ground. A gathering of children blocked his view of whatever activity in which they were partaking, partly because of their numbers, and partly because a lot of them were carrying push brooms. 

Kaworu stood up onto his tiptoes, bracing himself with his hands on the rim of the basin, but he still couldn’t see what was happening beyond the outermost row of the formation. They finally turned to acknowledge him when he fell with a thump onto the ground after leaning too far forward. 

“What are you doing with Sachiel?” he asked. 

“Oh, you’re awake,” Asuka’s voice said from somewhere in the middle of the pack. The other children scrambled out of her way with exclamations of disgust when she began swinging her own broom back and forth to clear a path to talk to Kaworu. Quite a few of them clamped their hands firmly over their surgical masks for a psychological booster shot against the omnipresent, vague airborne pathogens, and he had to wonder when they had suddenly started caring so much until he saw Asuka standing in the middle of Sachiel’s tongue in her full rain gear and rubber gloves. She shook her broom menacingly at a a few stragglers to chase them away before she said to Kaworu, “You’re welcome inadvance.” 

“For what?” Kaworu asked pleasantly. 

“For making the place where you sleep cleaner.” She gave one of Sachiel’s top gums a prod with the end of her broom handle, then dipped the bristles into a bucket of soapy water she had balanced on its molar and began scrubbing at its second row of top teeth, flinching away when the water began dripping back down. 

“What are you doing?” Kaworu asked again, unsatisfied with the non-response he’d received the first time he’d posed the question.

“What does it look like? I’m brushing his teeth, duh.” 

Kaworu propped his chin up on his hands to study this foreign ritual. “Why?” 

“Because having a mutant is like having a dog; it’s a big responsibility, and he’s my mutant so I have to take care of this stuff.” When they saw that she was no longer threatening them with sea monster saliva, several children crept back to Sachiel’s incisors to get in on the action as well. “Make sure you get the backs too,” said Asuka.

Kaworu tried to make eye contact with Sachiel, but with its mouth so wide open and slack jawed, its face was bent too far backwards. “How’d you get him to do that?” he wondered aloud. 

“A lot of hand gestures,” Asuka said brusquely. 

“Huh.” Kaworu surveyed the area now that he’d gathered sufficient information on the main event. “Where are Touji and Kensuke?” _And more importantly, where is Ikari-kun?_ he refrained from asking. 

“Um, I think they went to go get some rocks for the fire pit. Oh yeah! Sachiel helped us dig that too. Uh, you can’t see it right now, but it’s over there.” Asuka pointed her broom handle somewhere off to Kaworu’s left. “We’ll push you to it when it starts later.” Some more scrubbing noises. “I bet those two are taking so long because Touji put too many rocks in it and they couldn’t move it up here.” 

“Maybe,” said Kaworu absentmindedly as he continued to turn back and forth. “Where is Ikari-kun?” he asked when he realized Asuka wasn’t going to offer the information unprompted and he could take it no longer. 

“I was wondering when you were going to ask,” Asuka said smugly.

“Does that mean you have an answer?” 

“He’s helping Misato in the garden right now,” she informed him before she recited another neighborly adage. “You’re really clingy, you know that?” 

“Yeah,” Kaworu replied wistfully. 

 

“Are you still moping about Stupid Shinji?” Asuka asked when she marched over to Kaworu’s spot. He was sitting with his chin propped on the edge of the tub staring sullenly at a few scattered picture books on the ground in front of him, which had been helpfully donated by some of the adults who felt he needed some more age-appropriate diversions. A ring of intricate scribbles circled the perimeter of Kaworu’s domain, and Asuka nearly tripped to avoid breaking the circle. “Is that like some magic mutant thing?” she asked excitedly. “Cause I’ve read about these. Are you trying to curse him or something? Can you teach me how to curse people?” 

Kaworu gave one of the books a sluggish poke. “Oh, are you done brushing Sachiel’s teeth, then?” 

“Ritsuko told me I have to let other people have a turn. So yeah, for now.” 

Kaworu turned the page by giving it an irritable flick. “In that case, can you keep a secret?” 

“Is it about magic?” 

“No.” 

The eagerness in Asuka’s expression quickly drained away to leave a flat affect behind. “Is this the one about Shinji being your boyfriend? Because everyone knows that one already.” 

“No, you have that wrong,” Kaworu popped up to say in defiance. “I’m _his_ boyfriend, but he isn’t _my_ boyfriend because he doesn’t love me, so for right now he’s just the person whose boyfriend I am, and that’s upsetting, but I’m more upset about something else right now, presently.” 

“Right now and presently mean the same thing,” Asuka said with a well-practiced eye roll. 

“Yeah, but how else am I supposed to practice using it, then?” 

“Just use one of them.” 

“Okay,” said Kaworu, eyes drifting upwards and to the left while he rewound the conversation in his mind. “No, you have that wrong; I’m _his_ boyfriend, but he isn’t _my_ boyfriend because he doesn’t love me, so for right now he’s just the person whose boyfriend I am, and that’s upsetting, but I’m more upset about something else _presently_.” 

“Better,” Asuka approved. “Now you can tell me what it is.” 

“I don’t mind if you tell other people, but you can’t tell Ikari-kun no matter what,” Kaworu implored, pointing his finger at her face to the staccato rhythm of “no matter what.”

“Sure,” said Asuka warily. 

“All right then.” Kaworu threw a few more shifty, rapid-fire glances around to make sure they weren’t being overheard, then he stage whispered, “I wanna know how to write Ikari-kun’s name, but I don’t actually know how to do it.” 

Asuka looked at him quizzically. “You can read but you can’t write?” 

“Um, actually, I can’t really read either.” Kaworu looked down at an ant that was crawling around Asuka’s right foot. His nails scratched nervously at the plastic rim of the basin. “Like… I look at stuff, and then Sachiel can see it, cause, you know…” He pointed at his temple. “So then _he_ sees it, and then he tells me what it means. Only I don’t want to have to keep relying on him, and when I read these —” another irritable poke at the smiling visage of Bob the Anthropomorphic Butterfly, who was on a quest to find his missing eyebrows, “I have to keep telling him not to help me. But then I don’t actually know what to do, so I’ve just been trying to copy these markings.” 

Asuka took the time to notice that the ring of mysterious runes, when placed under a harsher lens, did indeed devolve into nothing more than a pastiche of kana rent asunder from their meaning and stitched back together with very, very bad handwriting. 

“I don’t really get it though,” Kaworu lamented, tearing up from frustration. “And Ikari-kun already knows a lot more than me about everything, so if I don’t start now then I’ll _never_ catch up and then he’ll _never_ like me.” 

Asuka let him flounder a bit longer before she put her hands on her hips and said, in a theatrically put-upon affectation, “Well… if it’s _that_ important to you, I guess _I_ could teach you how to write.” 

Kaworu looked up at her in wonderment. “Really?” he sniffed, scratching underneath his eye to get rid of the tears. 

“Sure I can. Wait here.” 

 

“You have it in the wrong order.” 

“Nuh-uh.” 

“Uh-huh,” Hikari said, shaking her dictionary in Touji’s face. “See? You’re supposed to learn the ‘ma’ ones _after_ the ‘ha’ ones.” 

“He knows _that_ ,” said Asuka. “He already learned the hiragana version.” 

Shinji heard a stick scratching something into the dirt, followed by Asuka’s “Oh, right, you spell your name weird, so it’d actually be…” There was a pause while she consulted something. “… _this_. Are you even paying attention?” 

“Ikari-kun!” Kaworu shouted, and he quickly threw the stick with which he’d been writing like a javelin into the nearest bush. Subsequently, Asuka, Hikari, Kensuke, and Touji all fell victim to a spray of water as Kaworu sliced his arm across the surface of his pool to wash away the evidence of their activities. Asuka quickly jumped up and began stamping out the shakily copied characters that were too far away for Kaworu to erase himself while the other three hastily dusted away the ones on the other sides with the palms of their hands. 

“Thanks for the warning,” Asuka whispered scornfully, wiping her arms off on her t-shirt. 

“You’re welcome,” Kaworu whispered back.

“When you start learning actual words,” Asuka said, “the first one I’m gonna teach you will be ‘sarcasm.’ ”

“What are you hiding?” Shinji asked, with a very obvious inculpating stare at Kaworu. He let the handle of the wagon he’d been using to transport the firewood drop to the ground with a hard thunk for emphasis. 

“Nothing,” said Asuka, raising her voice back to the appropriate amount of decibels for polite conversation.

Shinji’s gaze raked over the ground next to Kaworu and discovered a stray “Shin” that had escaped the others’ haphazard cleanup. “Is this, like, some mutant thing where you cast a spell on me to make me fall in love with you?” His hands flew to the top of his head and began patting down his scalp to check for any missing chunks of hair that could have been removed for nefarious purposes. 

“I would never do that to you,” Kaworu gasped. “Ikari-kun, how could you _say_ that after what I said to you yesterday?” He began to snivel. “Why,” he sniffed, “do you think so lowly of me? Do you _hate_ me, Ikari-kun?” 

“No,” Shinji quickly said, startled at having his rhetorical footing knocked out and finding himself staring down the barrel of the accusations now. 

“But you don’t like me either,” Kaworu whimpered. 

“Way to go, Shinji,” said Kensuke. 

“Yeah, way to go, Shinji,” mimicked Touji. 

“Are we really gonna do this again?” Shinji asked Kaworu wearily. “I thought we were done with this yesterday.” He finally relented when Kaworu began hiccuping from trying not to cry. “Okay, Nagisa, I’m sorry.” 

“Do you really mean that, Ikari-kun? Are you sure you’re not just saying that because you feel guilty?” 

“Uh…” 

“Well, it doesn’t matter. Because…” Kaworu stopped to hiccup. “Because no matter…” He hiccuped several more times in quick succession. “No matter what you did to me, I’d always forgive you, only you should know, Ikari-kun, that it isn’t good for my heart.” He pointed to the right side of his chest.

“Wrong side,” Hikari murmured gently, and Kaworu shifted his hand accordingly. 

“It’s not good for my heart,” he repeated.“Because I’m still getting crushed, _presently_.” He looked to Asuka for verification.

“Um, close enough,” she said. 

“Okay, Nagisa… okay. I believe you. I’ll try not to yell at you anymore.” He walked over to crouch down in front of Kaworu, then took his hand and wrapped his pinky around Kaworu’s. “Feel better?” 

“I’m not getting crushed as much, presently,” Kaworu confirmed. 

 

Their second attempt at introducing Kaworu to the concept of recreational bonfires went much more smoothly than the first. Although he’d seemed open to the idea when they had presented it in verbal form, the actual event itself had been promptly derailed when he caught sight of the matchbox in Asuka’s hands and swiftly leapt headlong into conclusions. 

“I’ve seen this before,” he’d shouted down at them from ten feet up, where he was clinging like a limpet to Sachiel’s finger, dripping water down on them. Upon sensing Kaworu’s distress, Sachiel had wasted no time clawing the rest of the way up the cliff to sweep Kaworu out of danger.

“You’re trying to _boil_ me. That’s what this is actually about, isn't it?” He turned back to whisper, scandalized, to Sachiel, “Who knew the Lilin were so barbaric?” 

“Don’t be disgusting. We _told_ you; all we do is sit around it,” Asuka yelled back up to him. 

“A likely story!” 

“Where did he even learn that phrase?” Asuka asked.

“Probably from you,” Kensuke said. 

“Well, if you wanna be like that, then we’ll just sit here without you,” Asuka began shouting again to address Kaworu. “And I guess Shinji will just have to hold his own hand.” 

Shinji threw the log he’d been carrying onto the pile with a grunt, then gave a testy “Don’t bring me into this.” 

Kaworu whined a little and unhooked his legs from Sachiel’s trunk-like finger in coordination with his dissolving willpower. However, he quickly reconsidered, flailed his legs around for a bit in frustration, and finally secured them back in their original position. 

From where they were standing, Asuka and the other children watched Kaworu wordlessly point between his mouth and Sachiel until Sachiel got the picture, revealing its own mouth so that Kaworu could climb inside before he dried off. He shielded himself behind Sachiel’s incisor and elevated his head into view to say, “Ikari-kun, I’m sorry, I’m really, really sorry, but I have to make sure your friends won’t boil me. I still love you, though, okay?” 

“Sure,” said Shinji.

Kaworu remained nestled behind Sachiel’s teeth as he staked out the bonfire, from Shinji and the others putting the finishing touches on the pile to Asuka tossing her surgical mask in for kindling (“I’m not afraid of germs”) to lighting the fire to Shinji panicking about whether or not they accidentally made it too big and if they might accidentally wind up starting a forest fire to everyone finally settling around it comfortably, trying to pick the best nearby sticks to make homemade torches. Hesitantly, he stuck his arm out to feel the smoke that was rising up to him along with strains of conversation. He hastily pulled it back in when a piece of ash landed on his skin, but that didn’t stop him from trying again a mere minute later. After a few repetitions of this, he looked up and said to the roof of Sachiel’s mouth, “I guess it does look all right after all, Sachiel. What do you think?” 

Sachiel didn’t say anything.

“Yeah, I think so, too,” said Kaworu. “But be ready to come and get me if that changes, okay?” 

And within a few minutes, Kaworu had returned to his tub, made himself at home in the conversation, and begun darting his hand out periodically to try to touch the flames. 

“For your information,” said Asuka, “if you burn your hand off, it’s not our problem.” 

“It doesn’t matter,” Shinji countered. “Since apparently he can just grow it back.” 

“You remembered!” Kaworu exclaimed happily, eyes shining. “Even though I only told you once!” 

“Yeah, only because it’s weird and gro—” Shinji caught himself. “Um, yeah,” he amended awkwardly.

“You never did tell us that story,” said Touji. 

Kaworu just shrugged. He picked up a stick and pushed the end of it into the fire to try to turn over one of the logs at the base. “It’s not that exciting. My siblings accidentally bite me sometimes, so I’m used to it by now.” 

“Wait, your siblings did that?” 

“Yeah, but it grows back, so it’s no big deal,” Kaworu abated, looking hurt at the others’ gasps of horror. “And it doesn’t happen as often now that I sleep in Sachiel’s mouth and not Gaghiel’s, since Sachiel’s teeth aren’t as sharp. Sachiel’s only done it once.” 

“So, like, what would happen if you got stabbed in the stomach? Do you grow a new stomach?” asked Kensuke.

Kaworu removed his stick from the fire and contemplated the small flame still dancing at the end. “I’m not sure. But I’ve heard that sometimes, Lilin say that they can kiss someone to make it better, so if I did get stabbed, then I would want Ikari-kun to kiss me.” 

“I would just make someone else do it,” said Shinji. 

“Well,” said Kaworu, “just so you know, Ikari-kun, if _you_ ever got seriously hurt, _I’d_ kiss you until you got better, and then I’d kiss you even after that if you let me, because I love you.” 

“That’s gay,” Asuka said, while everyone else snickered and Shinji made gagging noises behind his surgical mask. 

When the fire began to die down a little, Kaworu allowed the others to extinguish their burning sticks in his water so they could use the charred end for drawing. He participated in this activity too, asking everyone to help him learn his characters by writing their names, one at a time, on one of his arms so that he could shakily imitate writing the kana on the other (as it turned out, Kaworu was ambidextrous). When both of his arms were thoroughly scribbled over, he’d give them a quick wash, dry them by the fire, and start the process anew. 

After he’d practiced writing Shinji’s name for the hundredth or so time, Asuka discreetly sidled up to him and demonstrated how to draw a heart shape, right next to the “ji” in “Shinji”. Kaworu quickly filled the entire rest of his arm with these and refused to write anything else on that arm for the rest of the night.

 

“It’s time for me to go,” Kaworu said when the fire had been long reduced to embers. 

“Already?” whined Kensuke, and he was quickly joined by a chorus of similarly disappointed voices.

“Yeah.” Kaworu looked sorrowfully at the barren remains of the sunflower he’d carefully picked apart that now coated his water once more. He languidly threw the stalk into the fire pit, where it sizzled faintly, and sent a pining sort of look in Shinji’s direction before he stood up to begin hugging everybody else goodbye. 

“Goodbye, Ikari-kun,” he said when it was Shinji’s turn. 

“Yeah, um, see you next month, then,” Shinji said, and to his credit, he at least attempted a friendly tone as he patted Kaworu’s back uncomfortably while Kaworu trapped his neck in a bear hug. 

“Kaworu, I can’t breathe,” he wheezed, breaking character when Kaworu began swaying side to side to prolong the hug. 

“Sorry,” said Kaworu. He reluctantly peeled his arms away, but before he departed, he took Shinji’s face into his hands, smearing a bit of soot on Shinji’s cheeks as he did so. “I’ll see you in a month, Ikari-kun,” he said, staring earnestly into the space where he could barely make out Shinji’s eyes in the darkness. “Don’t forget that I love you.” He reached down to squeeze Shinji’s pinky finger in his own, and they stayed like that until Sachiel pulled him away. 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know why, but I have this weird arbitrary rule in my head that each new chapter needs to be at least 5000 words, and I think that's a lot of what's holding me back when I start a new one, because I'm like "uuruughghgh that's so much." I really need to get over that. 
> 
> If that bonfire scene sounds familiar to you, it's because I wrote it as a fill for chusska on tumblr, and it's been slightly edited for its inclusion in this chapter.
> 
> As always, you can come a-kawoshinning with me at [angelic-courting-rituals](http://angelic-courting-rituals.tumblr.com/), for fat-free fluff, or [lady-daedalus](http://lady-daedalus.tumblr.com/), for nothing of particular merit.


	9. Plebeians have more fun, and sunflowers are a boy's best friend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which epithets are generated, curse words are acquired, and Kaworu learns about Getting To Yes, but not quite the kind he had in mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *looks at date of last update*  
> Anyway

“Oh, Mister… Scrivener-Bracegirdle,” Ritsuko said, elongating the words as she wrote them down. “your… physiognomy is such… that I have ne’er glimpsed… in all mine… peregrinations. Such… sagacious… forehead wrinkles!” She stopped, then looked down at Misato, who was lying on the floor “because it’s too hot, and heat rises, so I’m staying as low to the ground as possible.” 

Taking the silence as her cue, Misato said, “It’s been like… at least a few sentences since we’ve described someone’s eyes, right?”

“Uh…” Ritsuko quickly scanned the half-filled notebook page. “Yeah, six sentences.” 

“Then, yeah, we should throw another one of those in before we forget.” 

“Ocean metaphor or gemstone metaphor?” 

“How bout gemstone?” 

Ritsuko consulted one of the many lists she’d begun keeping in the margins of the paper. “Okay, the ones we haven’t used yet are: blue dumortierite quartz, blue serendibite, blue jeremejevite, blue chalcedony…”

“We already ran out of all the regular ones?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Um, the third one, then. It sounds the hardest to say. Oh! You know what the guy needs, though? An _epithet_. Let’s give him an epithet.” 

“Oh yeah, good idea.” 

“See?” Misato teased. “This is pretty enjoyable, right? So it didn’t turn out _all_ bad.” 

Ritsuko gave her a fond, yet put-upon expression, then announced, “I’m putting on a fond, yet put-upon expression.” 

“Ooh.” 

“I mean, yes, it’s enjoyable, but at the same time, let’s never have to do this again.” 

The latest round of Kaji and Misato’s perpetual background tiff, which Ritsuko referred to as the Pettydome in her heart (and in Asuka’s company), had ended with Kaji getting back at Misato for neglecting to fix his bike by returning from his first trading expedition on his newly repaired bike with an armful of nothing but trashy romance novels for new reading material. 

“It would be one thing if they were any good,” Ritsuko had said irritably after reading aloud a scant five pages of _The Wench of the Hidden Window_ , “only — oh no, it actually wouldn’t, _would it_ , because _someone_ forgot that since _someone_ gets all her books read to her out loud by her friend, everyone else can hear what _someone_ and _someone’s friend_ are reading —”

“I’ll have you know that unlike you, I’m not beholden to the whims of the public, and that I actually care deeply about what’s happening in the story.” 

“About wenches?” 

“Wenches are people, too,” Misato proclaimed, which prompted Asuka to ask what a wench was. Misato had had a great time that afternoon listening to Ritsuko try to censor the content as she read aloud. (“You’re such a… useful engine, Wynter. Such a… useful, useful engine. The most beautiful… uh… snifting valve I’ve ever seen.”) 

After a while, though, the whole thing quickly lost its entertainment value, as Misato and Ritsuko were horrified to find that the more time they spent in that dark prosaic forest, the more they became accustomed to its paths. Halfway through the second book, they came to the awful realization that they'd heard all these euphemisms before, and they weren't nearly as funny anymore as they had been upon first glance. There was no other course, they decided, but to take up the practice themselves to pass the time, just to show how it was done. 

Their activity was put on pause when Misato heard the cadence of Shiji’s boot-clad feet thumping down the hallway. She placed the formulating epithet on the proverbial back burner where, in the passing time, it would hopefully boil down to a truly potent reduction of a moniker.

“Misato,” Shinji heralded, and Misato already knew what tidings he had come to bear when she smelled the bouquet of mint leaves he pushed into her face not long afterward. 

“The solar still is full, and also I already checked on the mint boxes so you don’t have to,” he said, and after she sat up, he placed her sunhat atop her head like a crown. She caught it against her hair with the palm of her hand before it could slide off. 

“Your hair is all tangled in the back. You have floor hair.” 

“Floor hair?” 

“Like hat hair, but from the floor.” 

“I’ll live, Shinji,” she said, though she could still hear him flitting about from side to side in order to assess the damage the floor had wrought upon her. “Shinji, it’s fine. I’m going to have hat hair anyway, so they’ll cancel each other out.” 

“That’s not how it works,” said Shinji disapprovingly, and while she got up and began gathering her gardening tools together, he continued to inform her about how “it’s not like when you add a positive and a negative number together. Or when you multiply two negatives together, which I _do_ know about, so don’t try to trick me.” 

“Yeah? What’s negative six times negative eight?” 

“Uh…” 

“That’s what I thought,” said Misato, smiling smugly as she walked out the door. 

“Stop trying to change the subject,” Shinji said, and his voice settled himself into a trot behind her, jumping out every once in a while only to open doors for her. When it came to the heavier doors leading outside, he threw his entire body against it, back first, and Misato eventually gave him assistance despite his objections. 

She found her way to the black basin sitting on the ground with the sign next to it reading, “MISATO’S WATER DO NOT USE, THAT MEANS YOU KAJI YOU PRICK.” (“What’s a prick?” Shinji had asked her after the sign had gone up. “It just means someone who’s annoying,” Misato had replied offhandedly, and the next day she found herself having to explain herself when Ritsuko had come to her, snickering, to tell her that Shinji was in trouble with Touji’s guardian for telling him to “stop being such a prick.”) She took the plastic tube leading from the solar still into the bucket and gave it a quick wipe down with some rubbing alcohol from the small bottle she carried in her basket, and in the meantime, Shinji checked the duct tape holding the plastic sheet in place around the perimeter of the basin, shoring up loose patches with the roll he kept in his own basket. Then, Misato gave an anticipatory wince before placing the tube in her mouth and giving it a quick drag to get the siphon to begin draining the water into the large bucket buried in a pit at the basin’s side. She spat in a manner she was proud to call unladylike, and then she quickly tore off a hunk of the mint leaves Shinji had brought her to chew on so she could cover up the alcohol taste. 

Shinji waited until she was well into the chewing process so that she couldn’t interrupt him when he said, “Don’t forget to put on sunscreen before you start.” 

“Okay,” she said through a mouthful of mint while she filled her watering can from the bucket. 

“‘Cause if you get a sunburn,” he continued as he clomped behind her on their way to the gardens, “then you’re gonna need to wear gloves when you sleep so you don’t itch them, only then you’ll have to make sure you wash them really well ‘cause they’re all dirty, and even then they’re also really rough, so I dunno if they’d even help that much anyway, so I think you should just try to avoid sunburns completely in the first place. Also,” he added austerely, “I’ve been meaning to tell you this for a while, but I think it’s time you started thinking about investing in a new sunhat.” 

“Oh really?” Misato asked, an indulgent laugh in her voice.

“Skin cancer is no laughing matter.” 

“I’ll think about it.” 

“Is that a ‘I’ll think about it’ like you’ll actually think about it or a ‘I’ll think about it’ like you’re just saying you’ll think about it?” 

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” She moved her way down the rows, which were delineated by strings of brightly colored beads hanging on the stakes at the ends, and settled herself into the sweet potato plants.

Then, she caught the sound of a particular walking cadence which, in her mind, lay on the end of a neon-lit neural pathway directly connected to the word “annoying.” (And this was not the glamorous kind of neon signage, either; it was the axon equivalent of a neon sign that’s flickering in some places and sharing gallery space on its wall with some artistically rendered curse words on the exterior of a disreputable establishment on the bad side of town.)

“Shinji, mint check,” she whispered, and she bared her teeth for inspection. 

“In between right canine and right side number four,” he said. He waited for her to scrub out the piece of mint with her nail before he gave an affirmative, “Good,” and not a moment too soon. 

“Misato!” Kaji said, infuriatingly pleasantly. 

“Go away.” 

“What, aren’t you happy to see my face?” When his joke landed with a nearly audible plop, he explained, “Get it? Because you — ”

“Yeah. Go _away_.” 

“Yeah,” said Shinji. “Piss off.” 

“Shinji!” 

“What? You say it all the time.” 

“I get to say it because I’m a grown up. You don’t.” 

“Well when am I gonna be old enough?” 

“Uh… when you’re twelve. We’ll talk about it later.” 

Kaji let out a judgmental “wow” of a whistle. “You’re such a bad influence, Misato,” he said. “Look, even your plants don’t like you. See?” 

“Ugh.” 

“They look good to me, Misato,” Shinji was quick to say. 

“Oh, I dunno.” Misato imagined Kaji leaning casually, and then she imagined him falling over because he’d been too preoccupied with looking nonchalant that he’d forgotten there was nothing against which to nonchalantly lean. Alas, his voice conveyed a tragic lack of bodily injury as he said, “Your sweet potato plants are looking a little mottled.” 

“Your patchy flesh beard is looking a little mottled, but, you know, what are you gonna do.” 

A long pause, during which Shinji turned his head back and forth between them, birdlike. “Patchy flesh beard,” Kaji repeated, slowly, taking his time to really gnaw on the sinewy digraphs. “Patchy… flesh… beard. Gosh, Misato, I had no idea your imagination was so _mean_.” 

“Didn’t need to imagine it, and not my words. Asuka told me it was there.” 

“Oh. Well, that makes a whole lot more sense. I should have known you weren’t that creative.” 

“Fuck you.” 

Shinji gasped. 

“Oh shit — I mean… ‘darn,’ ” Misato said, frantically attempting to course correct, veering dangerously close to the borders of family-friendliness while Kaji laughed in the background. 

 

“Misato and Ritsuko and Kaji all swear a lot when they’re together, have you noticed?” Shinji asked Asuka the day Kaji’s group got back from their latest trading session and he’d overheard Ritsuko saying “What kind of fucked up children’s books are these?” 

 

“What kind of fucked up children’s books are these?” Ritsuko asked as she paged through the smorgasbord of books Kaji had brought back with him. 

“Hey, beggars can’t be choosers, right?” he said with a sly smile as he tossed her another smut book. 

She held it by the corner of the cover, trying to avoid touching the anatomically creative illustration that graced it, including the conveniently placed swans that fulfilled the minimum modesty requirement. “I’d rather read the psychologically damaging kids’ books, thanks,” she said, and dropped it into her discard pile. Theoretically, she was against the practice of burning books, but the times, they had a-changed. 

The fresh collection of children’s books that they’d scraped together for Kaworu’s next visit had been described by a number of people, Ritsuko included, as “questionable content.” There was the story of the bus driver who was driving home at night, nearly hit a semi truck in front of him, picked up an old woman at one of the bus stops, found out mid-journey that the old woman was the ghost of his dead grandmother, had a conversation with the ghost of his dead grandmother in which she instructed him to pay attention to the light in front of him, and then awoke from the coma he’d been in for two months because he’d hit actually hit the semi truck in the beginning of the story. There was the story of the taxi driver (“What was the author’s damage with public transport?” Misato would ask later) who was driving around (at night), picked up a girl who said she needed a lift because her bike was broken, drove the girl home, waited for the girl to come back out of her house with his fare, rang the doorbell when she didn’t, and came face to face with the girl’s mother who told him that the girl he saw was the ghost of her daughter who died three days ago in a tragic bicycle accident. And now, Ritsuko was helping herself to the harrowing tale of the cats who were at a birthday party and, upon the realization that it was time to return to their homes, all broke down one at a time to reveal to each other that they didn’t know where their families were. She got to the part where the last cat of the bunch had joined in the chorus of tears when Kaji said, “Hey, look at it this way, Kaworu’s gotta learn about the harsh realities of the world early, right? Builds character.” 

 

Having heard this story, which Shinji had taken care to censor with the appropriate level of embarrassment, Asuka looked over her shoulder to make sure Misato and Ritsuko weren’t eavesdropping, but they were too busy counting out seeds on the table and sorting them into repurposed pill organizers for Ritsuko to take for trading. She waited up until the part where Misato was complaining that Touji and some of the other children were growing out of their clothes so quickly that it was starting to strain their resources and Ritsuko resigning them both to the unfortunate truth that things would only get worse from here before she turned back to reply.

“Yeah,” she said wistfully. I can’t wait until I’m old enough to swear with my friends all the time.” 

Shinji wanted to go over to Touji and Kensuke and bring them in on the conversation, but they were deep into their third spiral notebook volume of their graphic novel. The last Shinji had heard of it, they had been working to resolve the problem of how the two halves of Israfel were going to overcome their differences and join forces against the latest menace to the city, which up until this point, they had failed to defeat because it was a ghost and therefore invincible to both bombs and torpedoes. Currently, Touji and Kensuke were hard at work designing the combined Israfel’s ultimate torpedo bomb, and they had ostentatiously announced to everyone present that they mustn't be disturbed whilst they were in the midst of their collaborative creative process. 

“When do they get to use the shield?” Kensuke kept asking. He’d been pushing the incorporation of the shield into their opus ever since Kaworu had told them during the bonfire that all of his siblings were able to project one under duress. Unfortunately, he’d had to leave before he could demonstrate, and unbeknownst to either party, Sachiel hadn’t approved of the way they’d all been planning to test the theory by throwing projectiles at Kaworu. 

This meant that Touji had continuously delayed the shield’s manga debut because he claimed that they needed to see it before they could draw it, although the real reason was that he had long held the belief (an entirethree and a half of his eight years!) that in battle, shields were inherently inferior to more offensive tools, preferably of the exploding sort. But Kensuke was getting impatient, and meanwhile, Shinji worried, both his mind and his lip between his teeth. 

 

Later that afternoon, Misato heard the quiet grind of crayon scribbling coming from Shinji’s room while he was supposed to be napping. (“Do they still need naps when they’re seven?” she had asked Ritsuko a while back, to which Ritsuko had responded, “I dunno, probably,” and that had been excuse enough for her.) 

“Don’t look!” Shinji yelled when she opened his door, and then she heard a muted slam — a notebook being hastily shut. 

“I can’t look,” she said dryly. 

“Oh… right. Sorry.”

“What are you drawing?” 

“Nothing,” Shinji said testily. “It’s stupid.” Soon his words were substituted with angry, crumpled-paper-being-thrown-against-the-wall noises. 

“Okay, then. I’ll come back when you’re being nice.” 

“Hey. Misato,” Shinji suddenly said. “Just so you know, I’m fine with not growing a lot if it means you’ll worry less.” 

“Oh… you heard that?” 

“Uh-huh.” 

“Well, it’s not something you need to worry about, okay? It isn’t anything us grown-ups can’t figure out.”

“Yeah, but still, just in case. ‘Cause I think it’s too late for Touji, and Kensuke’s gonna want to be tall if Touji’s tall, and Asuka definitely doesn’t want to be short, so that leaves me and probably Hikari. So, like, keep in mind, ‘cause I don’t mind not being tall if it’ll stress you out less.” 

“That’s really sweet of you, Shinji,” Misato said, “but I’m afraid there’s not a whole lot you can control about how tall you grow.” 

“Asuka said that she read a story about a guy who got himself to grow by sleeping in a dark room a lot, so I pretty much just need to do the opposite of that.” 

“Asuka should know that she can’t believe everything she reads.” 

Shinji considered this new hypothesis, but his mind quickly ruled it inviable and tossed it aside on the grounds that “You guys always said reading would make us smarter.” 

“That’s mostly true. Asuka will figure that out eventually; she’s a smart girl.”

 

“See,” said Hikari, “you get to be the nice one; that’s a good thing to be.” She waited for Shinji to puzzle his way through the next few passes of the braid she’d been teaching him to make in her hair. Inwardly, Hikari thought of herself as “the patient one,” which she thought was also a Very Good Thing To Be. This evaluation wasn’t unwarranted, and incidentally, it would have been her epithet.

“It’s not as good as being the smart one,” Shinji said once he’d found a good stopping point. “If Asuka gets attention for being the smart one, and Touji and Kensuke get attention for being the creative ones, and Rei gets attention just for being weird, then what does that mean for us?” 

“I dunno,” Hikari admitted, “but Touji and Kensuke’s comic isn’t actually that good. I’ve _read_ it. They just look artsy because they’re _prolific_.” What Hikari also thought inwardly — much, much further inwardly — was that although being “the patient one” was a Very Good Thing To Be, it still wasn’t as good as being “the smart one,” and this had quite the influence on her recent decision to secretly study the dictionary. Just last week, Asuka had invented a new game called “Sink Odysseus’ Ship,” which involved a clear vocalization of the participants’ admiration that she knew the reference, followed by the participants throwing a largish branch into the water so they could pelt it with stones until it sank. Clearly, Hikari needed to up the ante if she wanted to stay in the running.

Her extracurricular activity was rewarded when she felt Shinji stop fumbling with his half-formed braid to ask, “What’s prolific mean?” 

“It means they make a lot.” 

“Oh. Okay.” 

“Plus, my sister says she thinks Asuka’s also the kind of mean one, so it probably all equals out in the end. And also, another thing.” 

She thought back to that morning, when Asuka had been showing off the improvised knife Ritsuko had secretly taught her to make and expressly instructed her not to show off. “I don’t approve of the glorification of violence,” she said, dropping a hearty tablespoon of sanctimonious judgment into her cadence and mixing well. She was a bit put out when Shinji didn’t properly appreciate the carefully curated color of it. 

“Okay,” was all he said. 

 

“So as I was saying,” Hikari tried again the next day, applying an even thicker layer of affectation than she had during her trial run, “I don’t approve of the glorification of violence.” She stole a quick glance at her sister, who was drawing some pictures in the dirt far behind them. “I believe that we should be setting a better example for the children.” 

Unfortunately for her, Kensuke had already counted himself among the ranks of unwashed masses who enjoyed running up and down the beach, hitting the dollops of washed up sea foam with branches under the pretense that they were invading alien blobs and zealously screaming, “Die! Die! Die!”

“Um, okay,” he said, and without further ado trotted down the stairs to the beach where Touji, Shinji, and Asuka were waiting for a thrilling round of whimsical, childlike carnage. Hikari’s moral backbone remained steadfast for an admirable ten minutes before she decided that, at the end of the day, plebeians have more fun.

The day’s episode of their planetary invasion adventures had a shorter runtime than usual because the humidity wore down their morale, and though of course they would never admit defeat, they conceded to come back another day to finish the job. Instead, they sat themselves down on one of the wider, flat rocks and took turns trying to predict the first lightning strike of the storm that was rolling in. 

“Bzzt,” said Shinji, pointing his stick at the darkest spot in the sky like it was a magic wand. 

“Bzzt,” said Touji a few seconds later when he’d judged that Shinji’s grace period had passed.

Hikari waited a bit longer before she tried her hand, by which time a few fat raindrops had audibly plip-ed themselves down onto their rubber boots. 

Asuka fussed when one of the adults cut them off before she could take her turn because they needed everyone to be inside before the rain really started. She took out a bit of her frustration on the way back up to the building by starting a petty argument with Shinji about whether cold rain or warm rain was better.

“I mean, warm rain is fine, I guess,” she said, “if you like feeling like you’re being peed on.” 

“Maybe you just like cold rain because it’s cold like your heart.” 

“Well that’s just good for me because then I don’t have to worry about gross mushy stuff like you.” She began to chant, “Shinji and Kaworu sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.” 

“Shut up.” 

“You shut up.” 

“ _You_ shut up,” Shinji reiterated, completely ignoring their chaperone’s request to please make good choices. 

“I wonder what Kaworu’s doing right now,” Kensuke said to Touji from where they were walking on the sidelines. “Kaji told me it’s getting really close to a full moon.” 

The rain began to well and truly pour just as they were being shepherded indoors. Around them, the adults hastily began setting out buckets, basins, and plastic bags to catch as much water as they could, cursing when one of the containers got blown over and then rushing out to set it upright again. Asuka smiled and added the really creative ones to her ongoing database, and this placated her so much that she didn’t even mind when Shinji said “ha!” about the rain being warm. Once they were in the basement, they camped out under tents they made by draping blankets over two cots, and they continued to “bzzt” the idle minutes away until finally Hikari got it right, just before a thunderclap came that sounded like a row of pillars falling down. 

 

“I’ve never gotten to see a thunderstorm on the surface,” Kaworu had told Kaji during that early morning visitation. “Sachiel won’t let me ‘cause he thinks it’s too dangerous.” 

“Well,” Kaji had said, “the sky is grey when it rains, but when lightning strikes, sometimes it looks lavender.” 

 

“I wonder what Ikari-kun is doing right now,” Kaworu said as he floated upside down inside the vesicle Sachiel had created for him. He tried to put as much of a sulk into his voice as he could to let Sachiel know exactly how displeased he was with the situation. That garnered him no sympathy, or indeed any reaction at all, so he kicked at the lipid layer that enclosed him like a baby impatient to be born. “I bet _he_ gets to watch the storm,” he said, and struck the walls several times in a presto rhythm. 

Earlier, when the very first signs of thunder had lazily rolled their way through the atmosphere, Sachiel had immediately caught on to the tail end of Kaworu’s train of thought, and similarly caught Kaworu by the leg as he’d tried to sneak his way to the surface. 

“I won’t break the surface,” Kaworu had wheedled even as Sachiel dragged him back down. “I just wanna get closer so that I can see.” 

He continued to whine and fuss all the way up until he found himself in his current position, and even then he had sourness aplenty to spare.

“Sachiel, _why_?” he had asked when Sachiel’s teeth had closed down around him.

“I’m not a baby,” he had said, clinging to Sachiel’s tongue as his eldest sibling relentlessly tried to shake him down into its throat. 

“I bet Ramiel wouldn’t be this mean to me,” he had said when Sachiel had at last managed to shake him loose. He’d fallen, not down into Sachiel’s trachea, but into the lining that was made of its gelatinous tissue; as he sank into it, it swallowed him and pinched off into a vesicle that floated around the inside of Sachiel’s body, cushioned from harm. Kaworu attempted several times to propel himself, jellyfish-like, against the lipid layer in hopes of bursting it. He would swim to one side of the vesicle, plant his feet against the wall and try to launch himself against the opposite side, but that quickly proved fruitless. 

“You never let me do anything fun,” he said when he’d depleted his plentiful energy supply, sinking like an anchor to the floor of his cell. He rolled over and shoved his face into the soft tissue to brood, but only for a few minutes before he peeked up to say, “Sorry, I know that’s not true. But! I’m still mad at you for right now, so I’m not going to talk to you anymore for a while, for your information.” Then he returned to his brooding, now that his conscience had been thus appeased. 

From what he could tell, Sachiel didn’t seem bothered by his threat in the least; now that he thought about it, Kaworu supposed, even a whole day’s helping of cold shoulder treatment must be a pittance to a creature of a robust 180(ish) years. He thought about adding a supplemental “maybe I won’t talk to you for a whole _year_ ” to his proclamation, but then decided not to so as to preserve the original’s integrity. This was to say nothing of the fact that, given the existence of their mental and emotional bond, Kaworu’s peaceful demonstration was highly ineffective (actually, his use of spoken language was itself a mere formality), but apparently his time among the Lilin had been enough to instill in him the behavior of doing something “for the principle.” 

Kaworu endured as best he could, keeping his faceplant position as Sachiel swam about in unburdened contentment. This became a struggle when the movements caused by Sachiel devouring a small school of fish shook Kaworu about uncomfortably, but every time he was displaced, he quickly reappropriated his jellyfish propulsion to settle himself back in. He still gave the lipid wall the occasional firm (but not painful) poke with his finger to remind Sachiel that he was still upset in case Sachiel had forgotten (it hadn’t). 

When Sachiel stopped suddenly and sent Kaworu hurtling against the vesicle wall, Kaworu was about to decry the action as cheating, but stopped when he felt a cold shockwave radiate from Sachiel’s core. It caused his bubble to bob gently and his stubbornness to dissipate. “What’s happening?” he asked anxiously when he began to receive a strong stress signal across their bond. He was thrust against the wall once more as Sachiel began to dive deeper, crushing the sunken Lilin buildings it passed over as it accelerated down the descending floor. 

Further down, Shamshel’s eellike tail stirred up cumulus clouds of sand and detritus as it raced to answer Sachiel’s call. 

They met each other less than a minute later, and before they could collide, Sachiel stopped, using the change in momentum to help it expel Kaworu’s vesicle back out through its mouth. The motion gave it a little burst, propelling the vessel forth like a small submarine before Shamshel snapped it up. It pulled Kaworu in close and interlocked its numerous bony arthropod legs to form a protective cage around him before the vesicle could burst under the increased water pressure. Then, with its cargo having been secured, Shamshel quickly burrowed beneath the ocean floor and stopped next to the spot where their sibling Sandalphon had made its home. 

Sandalphon’s eyes opened at the disturbance. They remained open, watchful so that Shamshel could tend to its primary priority. While Sachiel prowled on the floor above them and Sandalphon played sentinel, Shamshel began to curl itself into a tight nautilus coil with Kaworu located at the center. It remained that way until the next day, holding him close to its core for warmth. 

 

“The first tenet of conflict resolution: don’t escalate!” was printed in large font on the inside of a book that had once been housed in an underfunded local library. This self-appointed heir to Moses’ commandment-based self-help legacy, jockeying for an elevated position with the many other pretenders to the throne, was an aggressively smiling businessman. The entirety of the self-help section was about a fifty-fifty split between his kind and the “aggressively smiling doctor” faction, although there was a lone aggressively smiling priest who had managed to throw his clerical collar in the ring. 

No one had read this book; in fact, only one girl had ever opened it, and she hadn’t even gotten around to reading the actual text of the Tenets of Conflict Resolution, because she’d closed the book in disgust when she’d seen the list was printed in Comic Sans. The bleak existence of Aggressively Smiling Businessman No. 86 was to end in tragedy, as the one person who could have greatly benefited from his wisdom and to whom the Comic Sans would not have been a deterrent passed above the sunken library long after the book’s pages had disintegrated. 

“I _hate_ you,” Nagisa Kaworu sobbed. When Sachiel had informed him that it had decided against letting him visit the surface this month, Kaworu had put an immediate, indefinite extension on yesterday’s “not getting along” contract, effectively breaking the First Tenet of Conflict Resolution and quickly closing in on the Second (“Don’t triangulate!”). 

“Ramiel,” he said. “Ra-mi _-el_ , tell him he can’t _do_ this.” When Ramiel didn’t cooperate, he made a quick verbal lap around the rest of his siblings’ names, and when none of them cooperated either, he crawled onto the rearmost of Sachiel’s molars and threw himself down on his back, hoping his siblings could all feel the discomfort this generated. 

“I _hate you_ ,” he repeated, and he wiggled himself over a bit so that one of the ridges on the crown of Sachiel’s molar pushed up against his spine. He stiffened up for maximum nuisance — this position was a crucial element for anyone looking to successfully play the guilt trip, an obscure instrument that sounds like the world’s smallest violin, and of which Asuka was a seasoned player. He’d wanted to adapt her favorite (albeit critically panned) performance of running away from home, but he wasn’t even able to get past the front door, as ’t’were, so he was also very angry about that. There was nothing for it, he decided, as Sachiel shifted its jaw around to accommodate Kaworu’s protest, but to make everybody involved as physically uncomfortable as possible. Mentally, he broadcasted a long, sustained, high-pitched frequency to all of his siblings while out loud he demanded, “What is it that you all have against true love?” 

A sudden blankness cropped up in his consciousness that meant his siblings had temporarily stopped listening to him. “I hope you’re all happy with yourselves when I finally get crushed and I die,” he shouted up to Sachiel’s supernumerary teeth. The acoustics in there were surprisingly good. 

Then he remembered something he’d heard one of the other children say when his friend refused to apologize for informing him that dinosaurs couldn’t be rainbow-colored. 

“I’d bet you’d be sorry if you were at my funeral!” he yelled. He didn’t actually know what a funeral was, but judging from one of the adult’s reactions, he figured it was probably one of those coveted “swear words” that were the talk of the town. To his displeasure, his own audience’s reception wasn’t anything like as passionate, so he tried a different cursing permutation. 

“ _You’re_ a funeral,” he said, adding a disgruntled little flop of his legs to the end. 

Still nothing, and his back was getting sore. “Fine then!” He sat up stiffly, but he refrained from massaging his spine, because he was very cool, like the cat he would eventually read about who didn’t cry even though he’d just realized that he and his friends had simply been using the sugary juice-drunken revelry of the birthday party to avoid thinking about the fact that they were all orphans. 

He burrowed angrily into the pouch in Sachiel’s cheek where he slept. “I hope you’re happy,” he said to Sachiel’s nearest molar. “Because now I’m planning to sleep forever and ever, and I’m not going to wake up unless Ikari-kun True Love’s Kisses me, so you can think about that, and also you can tell everyone else to think about that too since they’re not listening to me, which you can tell them I also hope they’re happy about.” 

Kaworu devoted all his energy toward maintaining his moral ground on this issue, doing his best to keep himself riled up just enough so that he could nap angrily. Later, he impressed all of his siblings when he didn’t even peek his head out to look at the chunk of earth Israfel had torn out of an isolated sunflower field to comfort him. 

 

On the surface, Shinji and Kensuke squinted up at the dusty moon in the blue sky. “That’s definitely a full moon today, right?” said Shinji. 

“I dunno?” Kensuke said while he mechanically smoothed down the wall of his mud castle. “I mean, I think so, but, like, I also thought it was yesterday, and he still hasn’t shown up.” 

“Yeah, but it’s definitely one of the three days today, right? Probably?” 

“Probably?” 

“He _bailed_ ,” Asuka said loudly from where she was having a tea party with Hikari and Touji. She’d just learned the word and was deep into her test run of all its applications. So far, her experiments had been approximately sixty percent successful, although given the lexical prowess of her peers, experiments with conclusive results at all were in the minority, so her results were a bit skewed. 

“Maybe he’s running late,” Touji suggested. 

“ _You’re_ running late,” said Asuka. 

“That doesn’t even make sense.” 

“ _You_ don’t make sense.” 

Hikari giggled and sipped some more rainwater from her morning glory cup. 

They continued to pass the time like it was a chore. A few more distracted rounds of “Sink Odysseus’ Ship” were played, followed by another patrol up and down the beach in search of alien spawn. However, their restlessness lent them to a more “falsely benevolent dictator who is unaware of the ‘falsely’ part” mindset, and so they ended up setting the majority of their captives free (“for now,” Touji warned, pointing his stick at an especially corpulent specimen). They were a bit more mentally present when the day wore on and they came to taking turns slapping mosquitoes off each other, and _then_ when Kensuke ended up with a visible handprint on his back courtesy of Touji, upon Shinji’s instructions they all spent a brief while huddled miserably under plastic ponchos to keep their skin itch, and therefore, infection free. But even he ended up abandoning his crusade when the humidity invaded his sanctuary and the condensation began to weigh down the hairs on his arms and legs. He remembered how Kaworu thought his goosebumps were cute. 

“Boooored,” Asuka said, lying down on her back and wriggling her limbs about effetely.

“Boooored,” the others began to join in, lying themselves down as well to gleefully revel in their show of misery. A few of them began rolling from side to side to really demonstrate the severity of their withdrawal. “ _Booooooooored_.”

“Maybe we should try sending him a message in a bottle,” Hikari suggested once their ensemble had shot past “greek tragedy chorus” status and was on its way to “Handel’s Messiah” levels of coordination, harmonization, and sheer artistic bravura. “‘Cause what if he had a memo but he lost it 'cause paper dissolves in water?” 

“There _is_ a lot of stuff he doesn’t know,” Asuka agreed. “He probably thinks 'cause he’s fine in water that everything is.” 

One of the adults happily handed over an empty plastic bottle when she realized it would make the noise stop. 

“Isn’t that littering?” asked Shinji when he caught wind of their plan.

“Nuh-uh, ' cause we’re gonna tell him to give it back in the message,” said Asuka. “Duh.” 

After many drafts, their final message read: “Dear Kaworu, this is a friendly reminder that you had an appointment with us, [here they had signed all of their names with as many flourishes as they could manage], and we are willing to excuse your tardiness on basis of ecks-ten-you-eight-ing sircumstanses. Please provide a doctor’s note upon your arrival. Also, return the envelope to the sender. [After which they all signed their names a second time, but in bold writing to make it look official.]” Hikari rolled it up neatly and drew her best approximation of a seal on it, Asuka stuffed it into the bottle and gave it to Touji, and then Touji wound up his arm and gave it his best pitch into the water.

The wind blew it back and it landed about five feet from the shore. 

“Huh,” said Asuka. 

 

A second wave of rain pushed itself into the land in the early evening, although this was the sort of steady, staticky rain that one could nap to, and for a while, they did.

“Shut up,” Shinji mumbled to the source of a woodpecker-like knocking sound on the window. 

“ _You_ shut up,” Asuka mumbled back. 

“Everyone shut up,” said Touji. 

The knocking stopped, then came back with an Old Testament-level vengeance. 

“Oh my _goood_ ,” Asuka groaned. “Kensuke, it’s not funny.” 

“It’s not me!” 

“Well you’re the one by the window.” 

“Maybe it’s a ghost,” whispered Hikari. The scary stories they’d all digested during last night’s campout in the basement were coming back up; they’d never really settled well with her. “Don’t look at it.” 

“I’m looking at it,” Asuka said, just to be contrary. 

“Don’t look at it!” 

“I’m still looking at it,” Asuka repeated, adding a dash of sing-song to her voice. The knocking had subsided once again, and she stared even harder at the window now that she felt it was safe.

This meant that she jumped the most when a palm smacked up against the windowpane. Hikari squeaked and pulled her blanket over her head just in time to shield herself from the next impact. Then the muffled shouting outside started up, and speculations among the group moved from the “ghost” to “axe murderer” category. 

“I’ll take care of this,” Asuka announced, and ran to the closet to grab a hollow plastic baseball bat. 

“Be careful,” said the blanket formerly known as Hikari. The shouting got louder.

Asuka threw the window open as impressively as she could and yelled, “Come at me!” into the rain. 

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” said Kaworu from slightly below her eyeline. “Only you keep ignoring me.” He jumped up and down a few times to try and see past her. “Is Ikari-kun there?” 

“Stop that,” said Asuka, bopping him lightly on the head with the bat, then pointing the end toward the mud splattered up his legs. “You’ll get mud all over. Also, it’s rude not to say hi to everyone.” 

“Sorry.” 

“I’ll set you up with manners classes later.” 

“Okay.” Kaworu sneaked another quick jump in. 

“Kaworu!” Hikari, Kensuke, and Touji all shouted, shoving Asuka out of the way. They were met with both an enthusiastic “Hello!” and a warm sheet of rainwater blown into their faces. A small “Hi, Kaworu,” trailed in after them, and then Shinji began to slink his way into the window, nudging himself into the spot under Touji’s armpit. 

“Hi, Ikari-kun!” Kaworu said, though he had to wipe away the water streaming down his face from his hair several times before it was intelligible. “Did you miss me? I missed you. _So_ much.” 

“Aren’t you supposed to be in the ocean?” 

“Sachiel said it’s okay for right now since it’s raining so hard and there’s no lightning. I got your message!” He waved around the crumpled water bottle he’d been using to knock on the window like he was trying to sprinkle them with holy water. “One of my siblings picked it up eventually, Israfel, maybe? Anyway, I think Sachiel felt bad when he saw it so he let me out to come see you.” 

Hikari smoothly cut through everyone else’s impressed “whoooa”s to say, “Would you like to come inside? We have blankets. We’re having a sleepover right now.” 

“Can’t,” said Kaworu. He moved his fingers up underneath his bangs to redirect the water so that he could speak properly. “Sachiel says I have to come back right away.” 

“Wait, so were you grounded or something?” Touji asked.

“What’s grounded? Does that count as a doctor’s note?” 

“Like, you did something wrong so you’re not allowed to go anywhere fun.” 

Kaworu mulled it over. “Maybe? Do they usually tell you what you did wrong?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Um, I don’t think so, then. My siblings think there’s something dangerous but they won’t tell me what it is.” 

“Oh,” said Kensuke. “So it’s like curfew.” 

Kaworu shrugged. “Sure.” When his shoulders fell, his t-shirt made a small squelching sound and a smattering of heavy water droplets fell into the growing puddle at his feet. “Hey, who’s all in there with you?” 

“Just us,” said Asuka. 

“Oh, good. 'Cause I have to leave soon, but I wanted to tell you to come to the beach and see me when it gets dark, only you can’t tell anyone else ‘cause it’s a _really cool thing_ ,” he said purposefully, looking directly at Shinji. “But you’re probably not supposed to know about it. So yeah.” 

“Yeah?” said Kensuke, and, Shinji included, they all leaned forward to make a crude conspiracy huddle.

“Yeah.” 

“What is it?” 

Kaworu put on his best shifty look. “I know where Ayanami goes.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am the opposite of Sting. I make promises very lightly, it seems.
> 
> I don't know what the Japanese equivalents of flowery smut prose or Comic Sans are. 
> 
> Those are all real children's books that really exist.
> 
> As always, you can come a-kawoshinning with me at [angelic-courting-rituals](http://angelic-courting-rituals.tumblr.com/), for fat-free fluff, or [lady-daedalus](http://lady-daedalus.tumblr.com/), for nothing of particular merit.


End file.
